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. 1d ago

    How a Human Embryo Implants-- New Insights From a 3D Model: Conversation with Dr. Amelie Godeau, Part I

    If you're on the internet even a little bit, you likely saw the viral video first released last August That showed for the first time what a human embryo implanting into a 3D matrix looked like.  The video comes from work trying to explore what the embryo is actually doing during implantation. Despite how critical this process is, implantation, required for any and every pregnancy, is one of those black box topics.  Both the details of exactly how the blastocyst attaches to the uterine lining and how it embeds itself into the lining have been virtual mysteries. We do have animal models. We've seen parts of this process in a Petri dish. We've never seen it in 3D before, until now.  Today, I'll talk to the first author of the paper from which the viral video sprung. The group of scientists that studied this question examine The many things an embryo can do unprompted by an effective uterine lining, and it is mind-blowing. Traction force and mechanosensitivity mediate species-specific implantation patterns in human and mouse embryos: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adr5199

  2. Sep 2

    Your Menstrual Cycle is a Vital Sign: Conversation with Dr. Mahalingaiah, Part II

    Your menstrual cycle requires the coordination of a number of different systems in the body. We've all heard of the hypothalamic pituitary ovarian axis, AKA the HPO axis. But the system is embedded in and reactive to many other systems in the body, including the uterus, and particularly the uterine lining, the immune system, metabolic and energy sensing networks, stress axis, the thyroid adrenal axes, circadian timing systems, autonomic nervous system, liver, bone, vascular system, and the gut.  Ovarian estrogen and progesterone act as whole body signals. Using menstrual cycle characteristics like cycle length, like variability of cycle length, like the heaviness or lightness of bleeding as signals of vitality or distress, may be an opportunity to better understand both our own fertility and our own overall health.  We'll get into some of the details about what is being done now and what the future looks like for using the menstrual cycle as a vital sign.

  3. Aug 26

    What can the Menstrual Cycle Tell us about our health: Conversation with Dr. Shruthi Mahalingaiah

    The menstrual cycle plays an enormous part in the lives of half the population of the world. People tend to focus on it as a conduit to pregnancy, and it is. But through the hormonal fluctuations that drive this cycle, it affects many other aspects of health. A better understanding of what a, quote, "normal cycle" looks like and how to understand your own cycle can impact other facets of your health because most cells in a woman's body have receptors for estrogen and progesterone. Given the importance of this process, doctors and researchers, like the one I'll talk to today, are thinking about the menstrual cycle as a vital sign, like temperature or heart rate or blood pressure. It's a way to check in on many other physiological processes in your body, not only in adolescence, but through menopause. The Menstrual Cycle as a Vital Sign: A Comprehensive review: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11790291/

  4. Aug 19

    What Wearables can tell us about Pregnancy & Pregnancy Loss: Conversation with Dr. Benjamin Smarr (encore)

    In the olden days, and in some circle even today, women measure(d) something called basal body temperature, which is a core temperature that can be used to track ovulation, by measuring their temperature right when they wake up. It's the first thing you do --with a special thermometer that measured to at least one 10th of a degree, and to record it on a chart, maybe on your phone, maybe on actual paper to identify a subtle temperature shift.  But those were the horse and buggy days of biohacking for fertility. Now we can wear a ring that provides a continuous readout of your temperature and sends it to an app on your phone. And not only can it tell you if you are ovulating. It may be able to tell you if you're pregnant BEFORE the tests you can get at the pharmacy. Today we talked to Dr. Benjamin Smar PhD, who has used sensor data to uncover some of the dynamics of your body in pregnancy.

  5. Aug 12

    Sleep and Your Menstrual Cycle: Why Your Period May Become Less Predictable, Conversation with Dr. Sarah Johnson, Part II

    Historically, one of the reasons for excluding women from clinical trials has been the idea that women's menstrual cycles have made their data too variable to study.  Wearable tech can and is having an impact on this specific issue, as researchers use data from watches and rings to not only track a cycle, but beyond that, to track many other aspects of physiology at the same time.  In fact researchers are now moving beyond that simple goal to try to make sense of these physiological changes in the context of our cycles. Today, I finish my conversation with Dr. Sarah Johnson, who's looking at data from wearables to understand both normal cycles and those impacted by various forms of birth control.  The menstrual cycle through the lens of a wearable device: insights into physiology, sleep and cycle variability : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-026-02799-9

  6. Aug 5

    Using wearable technology to understand the menstrual cycle: Conversation with Dr. Sarah Johnson, Part I

    Wearables are everywhere, and they're tracking all manner of physiological signals continuously, including our heart rate, temperature, respiration rate, and other features while we go about our daily lives.  Do these devices actually measure what they say they measure? Are they reliable?And if they are, can this information be linked to the menstrual cycle to better understand normal and abnormal cycles and symptoms? Today, I talk with a researcher trying to wring meaning out of the data generated by these wearables to better understand women's health with specific interest in how changes in things like temperature, heart rate variability, respiration rate may offer clues about what's happening in our menstrual cycle, both when we take various forms of contraception and when we don't. In this episode we talk about: Decoding Menstrual Health Across the Lifespan: A Scoping Review of Digital Health Tools (2026): https://www.nature.com/articles/s44294-026-00146-7 If you want more details about the influence of copper IUDs on the tissue of the uterine lining, see: Effects of Copper Containing Intrauterine Devices on the Endometrium (2021): https://mednexus.org/doi/10.4103/2096-2924.309791

  7. Jul 29

    How does labor start? How do we measure labor stages? A walk through the research

    Every human enters the world through a pregnancy that either ends with a vaginal delivery or a C-section. So every human on the planet has been through birth.  technically speaking. Given that shared experience, it seems like birth, the how and the how long of it, would be a topic with a lot of relevance to many, many, if not all people. And, that maybe, we would understand what triggers labor and how to measure it's progress. But to date, there are lots of holes in our understanding of this critical process. What initiates spontaneous labor? What should labor look like? When does it officially start? How long should each stage last? These questions are really important, because they inform doctors about what to expect and how to manage labor. In today's solo episode, I try to walk us through current theories of the how and the how long of birth. Previous episodes about triggers for labor: Dr. Christina Herrera talks about the placental clock and how it relates to preterm birth: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/using-the-placental-clock-to-predict-preterm-birth/id1779600854?i=1000702829834 Dr. Roger Young talks about how electricity moves through the uterus in active labor: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-new-research-on-uterine-contractions-could-revolutionize/id1779600854?i=1000681642524 Dr. Yong Wang talks about how we can measure the electricity that moves through a contracting uterus:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/understanding-how-uterine-contractions-work-a-key/id1779600854?i=1000691330103 Dr. Polina Lishko talks about the electricity of labor at the cellular level: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/turning-labor-on-and-off-the-identification/id1779600854?i=1000713382865

  8. Jul 22

    What triggers Spontaneous Labor? A research based theory: conversation with Dr. Todd Rosen (Encore)

    Today I'm gonna share an episode that was originally aired about a year and a half ago about what might be the trigger for starting spontaneous labor. It's kind of amazing that this fundamental experience that all of us have starts with an event that arrives by surprise. In fact, we accept that , labor, if it starts when it starts, will be a surprise. Every popular depiction of a woman in labor that you've seen on TV or in movies or experienced yourself contains at least one real truth. The start of labor is a surprise. It's a surprise because despite the many things we 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 1 in 10 births in the U. S., does it turn on too early? This is the topic my guest, Dr. Todd Rosen, talks about today. Collaborator, Bingbing Wang, have developed a compelling theory about the conversation between the placenta and the fetus. That may explain what these triggers are.

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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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