Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body

I admit that I love a cross over event, especially when it comes to pregnancy and birth research. Today's crossover involves the use of sports medicine to think about issues that come up in delivery. In particular, we'll talk to both the CEO and one of the co-founders of a company making a device to predict postpartum hemorrhage before it happens. Something like 40% of cases happen to wo...

The human placenta is a superhero of organs. It's a master regulator of hormones, a negotiator with the maternal immune system, and capable of adapting structurally and metabolically--in real time--to changes in it's environment to cater to the fetus. But it also has a lot of black box features, in part because it is a difficult organ to study.  My guest today talks about an amazing para...

Last week we talked about the magic of peering into your brain, looking for clues about what issues might visit in pregnancy by using the non invasive retinal scan. Today we add more possibilities to that list of things to look for in the second half of my conversation with Dr. Li. she's an Assistant Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the National University of Singa...

 In today's episode, I'll share some research conducted by doctors in Singapore that gives you a sense of how close we are to using non invasive scans to predict conditions in pregnancy and fertility before clinical symptoms arise. What these research physicians are doing is making use of a retinal scan--taking pictures of the tiny vessels at the back of your eye and measuring changes in...

​There are many routes to depression, in  pregnancy and postpartum, and one route that we focus on today is that of immune dysregulation. Pregnancy is a time of real immune disruption as your body shifts its resources to protect the baby from the mother's body, and the mother's body from infectious agents in the environment. Researchers think that how these shifts play out can contribute...

 This week's episode is a bit of a prequel focused on the making of the egg, which will make the embryo. Sorry guys. The sperm is an NPC in this one.  Why do we care? Because we might not even think about how eggs are made. Until circumstances require it often in the form of a miscarriage, miscarriage rates on average are pretty high. Something like one in four suspected,  and that's jus...

This week's episode feels, in some ways, like an admission that The easter bunny isn't real, and spoiler, neither is santa...we focus on research that considers ways to predict spontaneous preterm birth. Preterm birth (which is anything before 37 weeks) comes calling for many different reasons, which is one of the challenges of studying it...but today's guest talks about some real b...

The star of this episode is the trophoblast cell. It goes for broke during implantation, fully embeding into the uterine lining and laying down the early building blocks of the placenta. This action is given an appropriately dramatic name:  trophoblast invasion. I’ll share some of the sci fi details of how a ball of cells, only half related to you, burrows into your body, creates a new organ to ch...

Perinatal mood disorders represent one of the most common complications of pregnancy--1 in 5 women will experience this during or after their pregnancy; a sizeable fraction of these women experienced some kind of mood disorder prior to pregnancy--but currently it's hard to predict how pregnancy will mix with this history. My guest today shares with us what the future of pregnancy could look l...

 Pregnant women live two lives simultaneously. They're going about their days, driving to work, or sitting down for coffee with a friend, essentially  living the lives they were in before they got pregnant. But now, at the same time, they could be doing it while also growing another human, laying down a brain stem, or working on a fetal heart.  All these developmental things are going on, and...

What happens in the womb doesn't stay in the womb--so said David Barker in the 1990s, a British epidemiologist, ​Barker found associations between birth weight and the likelihood of developing cardiovascular disease later in life.​  He argued that the uterine environment can have long term effects on future health.  Much work has been done to map out exactly how ​fetal experience during pregn...

Every popular depiction of a woman in labor that you've ever seen on TV or in movies or experienced yourself contains one real truth: the start of labor is a surprise. It's a surprise because despite the many things we do know about labor, we don't know how or why it's initiated. What series of things have to happen to get labor to turn on, and why-- in one in ten births in the...

Each baby is born with a pregnancy diary they've kept while they've lived in their mother's body, otherwise known as the placenta. In the US, only about 20% of placentas are dissected after birth and carefully examined under a microscope, usually to better understand what went wrong in cases of  intrauterine growth restriction or stillbirth; and for the other 80%, (that's more...

 Monitoring contractions in labor hasn't changed in 50 years--the most often used tool, the tocodynamometer, uses an indirect, one dimensional view of uterine activity in labor.  Dr. Wang talks about applying the tech used in cardiology to the uterus, to create a three dimensional way to non invasively measure electricity as it travels through the smooth muscle of the uterus, creating contrac...

You may not have given much thought to the lining of your uterus, aka your endometrium; but it is a super important workhorse when it comes to pregnancy, and one that, it turns out, has a voice. The old story used to be that the endometrium is this passive, patient group of cells waiting to give any embryo it glimpsed a warm, safe harbor to grow. Today's guest shares the updated story: the en...

On average in the US 1 in 10 babies is born prematurely and, in many cases, the cause is unknown; although there could be many contributing factors, nearly 40% of pregnant people who deliver before 37 weeks exhibit chronic placental inflammation , which happens when the mother's immune system attacks the placenta.  Today's guest is trying to decipher the conversation between the immune s...

Preterm birth is a significant problem in the world and affects one in 10 pregnancies in the US. Any early birth anytime before 37 weeks. Could lead to a host of negative outcomes, both for the mother and the baby. What can be done? Today, I talked to a researcher about his work examining how aspirin taken early in pregnancy can decrease the rate of preterm birth. Dr. Hoffman's most recent pu...

This week's episode is a continuation of my conversation about developing our skills to best use the placenta as a diary of intrauterine life.  Dr. Parast shares more of her work about the promise of placental pathology to better understand both the pregnancy that has been completed and potentially to better predict what a future pregnancy could hold.  We also talk about:  * how to prepare yo...

The placenta is the diary of intrauterine life , so says Dr. Parast and her collegues. They are using this diary, after birth, to better understand both the trajectory of problems in birth (like IUGR and preeclampsia) as well as markers of impending morbidity for mothers (like autoimmune conditions that have not yet crossed the threshold of noticeable symptoms). Dr. Parast believes that placental...

Many first time mothers experience the schedule of OB visits as informative: there are few visits in the beginning of the pregnancy and many near the end and one might take that to mean that there is more going on at the end than the beginning of gestation.  In fact, there is a tremendous amount of activity going on in the opening weeks of pregnancy, but until now, we understood very little of it,...

Here we are in the 21st century and we're just figuring out how uterine contractions work . Humans have giving birth for millions of years and we are only now unpacking part of the uterine contribution to this magic trick. For years scientists used a rodent model to interrogate how uterine contractions work, which turned out to be the wrong model; scientists used the heart as a model organ to...

Although postpartum depression is the most common side effect of pregnancy–roughly 1 in 6 women will experience a less often studied condition that may be equally common-- post delivery post traumatic stress disorder.  Dr. Sharon Dekel, PhD is a leading researcher in the developing field of childbirth related PTSD.  Her lab is focused on understanding, diagnosing and treating this regrettably comm...

The brain fog and forgetfulness that may accompany pregnancy and postpartum is almost always described negatively as "mommy brain"--but this phenomenal brain plasticity needs a rebrand. What's actually happening is that the brain, like almost every other organ in the body, is adapting to the dramatic state of pregnancy. Some changes are transitory in the brain, as they are in the bo...

I am both hopeful and moved, AND filled with disbelief after my conversation with today's guest.  He is an OB who has done an inordinate amount of work to make birth safer first for Californians, then for women across the country. His work, which you'll hear about and be able to use in your own pregnancy, is inspiring.  What I can't get my head around is the state of maternity care...

Making Sense of Pregnancy is a show that seeks out answers to lots of the questions we are confronted by in this enormous transition. I'm finding and talking with experts, doing cutting edge work to better understand what we do and don't know about pregnancy and what you can do to better understand your own experience. Each week, I'll be talking to scientists, doctors, and researche...