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

Paulette Kamenecka
  • 5.0 (3)
  • Education
  • Updated Weekly

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.

  1. 5d ago

    Looking for Patterns in your Menstrual Cycle as Keys to Overall Health: Conversation with Dr. Gombert-Labedens, Part II

    We are at the cusp of understanding more about the complicated conversation going on between your brain, ovaries, and pituitary. Your menstrual cycle contains within it information about your overall health, and the work we'll talk about today gets us one step closer to deciphering important elements of this conversation.  In particular, by organizing data according to the rhythm of menstrual cycles, we are looking not only at a level change, for example, is temperature going up or down in different parts of the cycle, but at the daily context in which temperature changes, which allows us to look for patterns in this change over time. In the future, we may be able to use these patterns to diagnose not only issues with reproductive health (ie, PMDD, endometriosis, etc.), but with health overall. Identifying Menstrual Metrics as Personal Health Markers: Age Trends and Individual Footprints in Temperature across 5674 cycles: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeb1175 Nanotechnology looking at measuring hormones: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-023-01513-0

  2. Jul 8

    What Can we learn about overall health by examining features of the menstrual cycle?: Conversation with Dr. Gombert-Labedens, Part I

    Your menstrual cycle is the engine of reproduction and a window into your overall health.  It's critical both for a successful pregnancy, and can tell us things about your endocrine, metabolic, immune, and cardiac systems.  We have tended to look at things like how heavy or light the flow of your period is, or the length of the cycle as signs of wellness or distress in your system. But some researchers, like the one I speak with today, are trying to mine different aspects of the cycle for information about overall health.  What Dr. Gombert-Labedens  and her colleagues are looking at is menstrual cycle linked temperature patterns, which change systemically with age and are surprisingly consistent within each person, so that they may be useful to track aging and detect deviations from a person's usual physiological state. We'll talk today about the state of this research and where it may be going Using activity trackers in pregnancy, conversation with Dr. Benjamin Smarr (part I): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/can-an-activity-tracker-tell-you-if-you-are-pregnant/id1779600854?i=1000719761885 Science Advances paper: Identifying Menstrual Metrics as Personal Health Markers: Age Trends and individual footprints in temperature across 5675 cycles: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeb1175

  3. Jul 1

    What can an organoid teach us about the human menstrual cycle: Conversation with Dr. Margherita Turco, Part II

    This is a glimpse of our future through the lens of the menstrual cycle. Women, on average, experience about 400 cycles in their lives, and the process is integrally connected to many other features of your overall health and, of course, is critically important to a successful pregnancy. Using 3-D human organoids, Dr. Turco and her team test different facets of the cells of the uterine lining to learn more about what in the world is going on in your uterus during your cycle.   In most studies of the human body, there's one particular market served by the research, but this one's a doozy. If you are a human with a uterus, this work is for you, and if you are planning to be born from a human with a uterus, this work is also for you.

  4. Jun 24

    Inside the Black Box of your Menstrual Cycle: Conversation with Dr. Margherita Turco, Part I

    For all recorded time, the human menstrual cycle has been kind of a mystery. Is your period too long? Is your period too short? Are you bleeding too much? Is there too much pain?  It's hard to answer these questions because I'm not sure it makes sense to compare yourself to some, quote, "average woman," because the menstrual cycle is so integrally involved in so many different systems in your body. It makes more sense to look at how your cycle is changing over time, but we don't even have very much data about that.  Can we experiment with mice? Sure. But our system is different from the system of a mouse.  Can we look at samples of the uterine linings of different women over time? Sure. But that approach tells a story that's not the same as whatever is going on in one person's uterus over time.  Today's guest is ushering in a new era of uterine lining exploration that will allow for a much more dynamic, human-centered examination of this amazing tissue that's critical for both a successful pregnancy and integral to women's health. She is opening up the black box of the human menstrual cycle.  An in vitro menstrual cycle using organoids captures epithelial cell transitions during menstruation and regeneration of the human endometrium: https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(26)00145-1?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS1934590926001451%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

  5. Jun 17

    Understanding Your Menstrual Cycle: Why It Matters, How It Works, and Why You Should Care

    Your menstrual cycle is incredibly important for your overall health and for your best chance at a successful pregnancy.  Creating a high-tech uterine lining each month that you will either continue to develop through a pregnancy or you'll eliminate if pregnancy isn't on the menu, is a biologically intensive and complex process. And there are a select few among all placental mammals who run this process the way humans do. Scientists estimate that less than 2% of placental mammals menstruate the way we do. Something like 84 species out of more than 5,000. All the primate species are relatively closely related, and we menstruate in a similar way, but there's also unexpected attendance at this intimate gathering of placental mammals that menstruate like us, including the spiny mouse, some species of bat, and the elephant shrew.  This week's topic is focused on why we essentially organize so many bodily functions around the way that we have a menstrual cycle, how on God's green earth we do it, and what information we can glean from keeping track of cycle to cycle variation.

  6. Jun 3

    Timing of Labor Induction affects C section rate: Conversation with Dr. Cortese and Dr. Hoffmann, Part II

    In many things in life, timing matters.  That's also true in labor.  If we can align when we induce labor with what's known about the circadian rhythms of our body, we may be able to take advantage of times at which our bodies are more receptive to these interventions, and turn that advantage into shorter labors or fewer C-sections. Based on this retrospective study, these outcomes came with no costs to the newborns. Today we talk about some of the details of this work, how circadian rhythms show up in different ways for women of different weights, and what might be driving the induction impacts in the first stage of labor.

  7. May 27

    How the Timing of Labor Induction affects the Length of Labor: Conversation with Dr. Cortese & Dr. Hoffmann, Part I

    If I told you that I've heard of a free way  to reduce the length of labor, to reduce the C-section rate for those most at risk of a C section, all without increasing the risk for the baby, you'd likely tell me to sell my magic beans to someone else.  But labor and delivery do not arrive in a uniform way at all hours of the day. In fact, spontaneous labors tend to occur at night, with birth in the early hours of the morning. Using this fact, the researchers I speak with in this episode share what they found by dissecting the time of day into 1 hour slots to measure how the starting time of induction impacts labor outcomes like duration and mode of delivery.  It turns out that timing can have dramatic effects on these outcomes--which may significantly impact a mother's experience of birth. Time of Day of Induction Impacts the Total Duration of Labor: https://www.ajogmfm.org/article/S2589-9333(26)00009-1/fulltext

    How the Timing of Labor Induction affects the Length of Labor: Conversation with Dr. Cortese & Dr. Hoffmann, Part I

  8. May 20

    Understanding Miscarriage and Stillbirth: Conversation with Dr. Harvey Kliman, Part II

    Miscarriage is very much a part of pregnancy. It's really common. Roughly 20% of implanted embryos are estimated to miscarry.  Unfortunately, stillbirth is also part of the process. The odds are 1 in 175.  But for most women who experience these outcomes, it feels like a shock, something you couldn't imagine would happen. In today's episode, I continue my conversation with Dr. Harvey Kliman, who explains why miscarriage and stillbirths happen and offers ways we can try to understand and mitigate the situation. Find the paper and the density plot here, too: Placenal Pathology Findings in Unexplained Pregnancy Loss: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10827979/

    Understanding Miscarriage and Stillbirth: Conversation with Dr. Harvey Kliman, Part II
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About

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.

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