Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body
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.
Episodes
84 episodes
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 tryin...
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...
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 oth...
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 ...
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 i...
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 a...
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, ...
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 a...
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 ...
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. <...
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, ...
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...
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 pregnan...
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 ...
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...
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 mo...
Why your Miscarriage Wasn't Your Fault: Conversation with Dr. Harvey Kliman, Part 1
Miscarriage is a well-known secret that you may not be aware of until it happens to you or to a close friend, but it's incredibly common. Studies suggest something like 15 to 20% of recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage or...
Eavesdropping on the first trimester: using new technology to better understand early maternal-placental crosstalk, Conversation with Dr. Shirley Greenbaum
As scientists have come to learn more about serious pregnancy complications like preeclampsia and premature birth, they believe that some of those complicated issues are born in the very earliest days of pregnancy. But the goi...
IVF & Egg Banking; Emerging Tech Trends in Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART)
We can initiate a pregnancy by handling eggs and sperm outside the human body. We can remove these elemental factors from people fundamentally changing the way eggs and sperm were built to interact and reinsert them into a woman's body to...
Ovaries: the living Vault of your Fertility
Question, are ovaries the most underrated organ? Answer: Yes. They're the workhorse of your menstrual cycle, this critical process that happens again and again and again to preserve your fertility, which may or may not be a top priority f...
Opening the black box of implantation with a model uterine lining: Conversation with Dr. Irene Zorzan, Part II
Today we'll continue our conversation about Project Implantation. In last week's episode, we were focused on how the model of the uterine lining was created and what it could do. This part of the conversation focuses more on w...
Building a 3-D model of a uterine lining to better understand implantation: Conversation with Dr. Irene Zorzan, Part I
Today we're going to talk about what I'm calling Project Implantation. It's a bold experimental model that creates a 3D version of a uterine lining as it would exist during the window of implantation--that period in the cycle...
How Fetal Sex influences Pregnancy Complications: Conversation with Dr. Vicki Clifton, Part II
The sex of the fetus often isn't even mentioned until the 20 week scan, but as my conversation with Dr. Clifton suggests, fetal sex can have real impacts on how the fetus negotiates intrauterine life, especially if there are challenges.
How the Sex of the Placenta Affects Pregnancy: Conversation with Dr. Vicki Clifton, Part I
Lots of research has been done trying to understand how the human placenta is similar to and different from placentas of other mammals; to specifically tease out exactly how the placenta contributes to a pregnancy, and how its formation affect...
A Blood Test to predict the risk of Postpartum Depression: Conversation with Dr. Jennifer Payne, rebroadcast
Postpartum depression is the most common complication of pregnancy.Given our current ability to measure it we think it will affect 10-15% of pregnancies, but it can be a tricky condition to diagnose because in the past, diagnosis has dep...