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
23 episodes
Looking into the back of your eye for insights about Pregnancy: Conversation with Dr. Li, Part II
Last week we talked about the magic of peering into your brain, looking for clues about what issues might visit in pregnancy by using the non invasive retinal scan. Today we add more possibilities to that list of things to look for in the secon...
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25:26
The Use of Retinal Scans to predict health conditions in pregnancy & fertility: A conversation with Dr. Li, Part I
In today's episode, I'll share some research conducted by doctors in Singapore that gives you a sense of how close we are to using non invasive scans to predict conditions in pregnancy and fertility before clinical symptoms arise.W...
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Season 1
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24:01
The Link Between shifts in your Immune System in Pregnancy & PPD: Conversation with Dr. Lauren Osborne, MD
There are many routes to depression, in pregnancy and postpartum, and one route that we focus on today is that of immune dysregulation. Pregnancy is a time of real immune disruption as your body shifts its resources to protect the baby f...
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33:05
The Decades Long Process of Making a Viable Egg Cell
This week's episode is a bit of a prequel focused on the making of the egg, which will make the embryo. Sorry guys. The sperm is an NPC in this one. Why do we care? Because we might not even think about how eggs are made. Until circumsta...
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Season 4
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20:11
Using the Placental Clock to Predict Preterm Birth: Conversation with Dr. Christina Herrera
This week's episode feels, in some ways, like an admission that The easter bunny isn't real, and spoiler, neither is santa...we focus on research that considers ways to predict spontaneous preterm birth. Preterm birth (which is anything before ...
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28:36
Your Placenta's Origin Story
The star of this episode is the trophoblast cell. It goes for broke during implantation, fully embeding into the uterine lining and laying down the early building blocks of the placenta. This action is given an appropriately dramatic name: ...
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28:03
Predicting Perinatal Depression: The Future of Maternal Mental Health, a conversation with Dr. Sheila Shanmugan
Perinatal mood disorders represent one of the most common complications of pregnancy--1 in 5 women will experience this during or after their pregnancy; a sizeable fraction of these women experienced some kind of mood disorder prior to pregnanc...
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30:35
Embryo & Endometrium Hacks to Make Implantation Happen: Amazing things your Pregnant Body Can Do
Pregnant women live two lives simultaneously. They're going about their days, driving to work, or sitting down for coffee with a friend, essentially living the lives they were in before they got pregnant. But now, at the same time, ...
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Season 1
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Episode 14
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21:56
The Connection Between the Womb and Lifelong Health: Conversation with Dr. Alison Paquette
What happens in the womb doesn't stay in the womb--so said David Barker in the 1990s, a British epidemiologist, Barker found associations between birth weight and the likelihood of developing cardiovascular disease later in life. He arg...
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30:40
How your Placenta and Baby "Talk" to Decide when Labor Starts: Conversation with Dr. Todd Rosen
Every popular depiction of a woman in labor that you've ever seen on TV or in movies or experienced yourself contains one real truth: the start of labor is a surprise. It's a surprise because despite the many things we do know about labor, we d...
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27:13
Unlocking the Secrets of the Placenta with AI: Conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Goldstein
Each baby is born with a pregnancy diary they've kept while they've lived in their mother's body, otherwise known as the placenta. In the US, only about 20% of placentas are dissected after birth and carefully examined under a microscope, usual...
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29:29
Understanding How Uterine Contractions Work: A Key to preterm labor, period cramps and endometriosis? Conversation with Dr. Wang
Monitoring contractions in labor hasn't changed in 50 years--the most often used tool, the tocodynamometer, uses an indirect, one dimensional view of uterine activity in labor. Dr. Wang talks about applying the tech used in cardiol...
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34:41
How the Endometrium's Interview Process Affects your Fertility: Conversation with Dr. Nick Macklon
You may not have given much thought to the lining of your uterus, aka your endometrium; but it is a super important workhorse when it comes to pregnancy, and one that, it turns out, has a voice. The old story used to be that the endometrium is ...
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Season 1
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Episode 11
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37:11
The Hidden Conversation Between the Immune System and Pregnancy: What It Means for Birth: Dr. Nardhy Gomez-Lopez
On average in the US 1 in 10 babies is born prematurely and, in many cases, the cause is unknown; although there could be many contributing factors, nearly 40% of pregnant people who deliver before 37 weeks exhibit chronic placental i...
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32:06
The Surprising Role of Aspirin in Fighting Preterm Birth Risks: Conversation with Dr. Matthew Hoffman
Preterm birth is a significant problem in the world and affects one in 10 pregnancies in the US. Any early birth anytime before 37 weeks. Could lead to a host of negative outcomes, both for the mother and the baby. What c...
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28:14
Does Modern Medicine Underestimate the Power of the Placenta? Conversation with Dr. Mana Parast, Part II
This week's episode is a continuation of my conversation about developing our skills to best use the placenta as a diary of intrauterine life. Dr. Parast shares more of her work about the promise of placental pathology to better un...
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Season 1
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Episode 7
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23:39
What we are Missing in Pregnancy Care when we Don't Examine the Placenta, Part I: Dr. Mana Parast
The placenta is the diary of intrauterine life, so says Dr. Parast and her collegues. They are using this diary, after birth, to better understand both the trajectory of problems in birth (like IUGR and preeclampsia) as well as markers o...
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Season 1
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Episode 6
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27:05
How Early Pregnancy Insights Could Transform Prenatal Care: Dr. Carl Weiner
Many first time mothers experience the schedule of OB visits as informative: there are few visits in the beginning of the pregnancy and many near the end and one might take that to mean that there is more going on at the end than the beginning ...
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38:43
How New Research on Uterine Contractions Could Revolutionize Labor Monitoring: Dr. Roger Young
Here we are in the 21st century and we're just figuring out how uterine contractions work. Humans have giving birth for millions of years and we are only now unpacking part of the uterine contribution to this magic trick.
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Season 1
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26:16
Why ‘It’s Just Postpartum Depression’ Misses the Mark for So Many Mothers: Dr. Sharon Dekel, PhD
Although postpartum depression is the most common side effect of pregnancy–roughly 1 in 6 women will experience a less often studied condition that may be equally common-- post delivery post traumatic stress disorder. Dr. S...
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Season 1
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41:51
It's not "Mommy Brain"-How Hormones during Pregnancy Prepare the Brain for Parenting: A Conversation with Dr. Laura Pritschet
The brain fog and forgetfulness that may accompany pregnancy and postpartum is almost always described negatively as "mommy brain"--but this phenomenal brain plasticity needs a rebrand. What's actually happening is that the brain, like ...
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Season 1
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Episode 2
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31:52
How Maternal Health Data Is Saving Lives: A conversation with Dr. Elliot Main
I am both hopeful and moved, AND filled with disbelief after my conversation with today's guest. He is an OB who has done an inordinate amount of work to make birth safer first for Californians, then for women across the country. H...
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Season 1
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Episode 1
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33:54