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. 3d ago

    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

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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.

  5. Jul 15

    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

  6. 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

  7. 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.

  8. 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

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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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