Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body
Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body
Podcast Description
Have you been surprised by what we do and don't know about pregnancy and birth today? If you are pregnant, or have been in the past, this show helps you understand what's happening (or has happened) to our bodies--both the short term and long term effects of this transformation. We explore the boundaries of our scientific grasp on the wildly complex processes of pregnancy and birth. After my complicated pregnancies, I went looking for answers and have interviewed hundreds of experts about women's health in this transition. Every Tuesday you'll hear:Scientists at the cutting edge who are trying to uncover how pregnancy and birth work and what happens when they don't workInformation you could use to better understand your own body in pregnancy.A better sense of the limits of your responsibility for what's happening inside your bodyListen to hear what you won't find on a blogpost or a book off the shelf.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast focuses on a wide range of topics such as the complexities of the endometrium's role in fertility, immune system interactions during pregnancy, the efficacy of aspirin in preventing preterm birth, and the significance of placental examination in maternal health. Specific episodes discuss groundbreaking research on uterine contractions, maternal health data, and the psychological impacts of childbirth like PTSD, aiming to demystify the pregnancy process while providing listeners actionable insights.
Have you been surprised by what we do and don’t know about pregnancy and birth today? If you are pregnant, or have been in the past, this show helps you understand what’s happening (or has happened) to our bodies–both the short term and long term effects of this transformation. We explore the boundaries of our scientific grasp on the wildly complex processes of pregnancy and birth.
After my complicated pregnancies, I went looking for answers and have interviewed hundreds of experts about women’s health in this transition.
Every Tuesday you’ll hear:
- Scientists at the cutting edge who are trying to uncover how pregnancy and birth work and what happens when they don’t work
- Information you could use to better understand your own body in pregnancy
- .A better sense of the limits of your responsibility for what’s happening inside your body
- Listen to hear what you won’t find on a blogpost or a book off the shelf.
Many pregnancy complications have a whodunit quality to them. Scientists don't yet understand exactly why things go wrong when they go wrong, but researchers tend to agree at this point that if there are issues with the placenta, the lifeline for the fetus, they can reverberate through the pregnancy into well-known conditions like preeclampsia, intrauterine growth restriction, in some cases preterm birth, as well as playing a role in the most common congenital birth defect, which are heart defects.
When we are looking for culprits for these pregnancy complications, some scientists have considered the role of your immune system in pregnancy, but those who study the immune landscape have left out the most common white blood cell in your body: the neutrophil. Of all the white blood cells in your body, around 60% of them are neutrophils.
They're part of the innate immune system, the first responders, and they're super important in everyday life. And as it turns out, also in pregnancy. Today's guest talks about the critical role played by the neutrophil in placental development and downstream in fetal cardiac development.
Dr. Suchita Nadkarni: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/whri/people/academic-staff/items/nadkarnisuchita.html
Placental Inflammation leads to abnormal fetal heart development in the journal Circulation: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.061934
Neutrophils induce proangiogenic T cells with a regulatory phenotype in Pregnancy in PNAS: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1611944114
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