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.
Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body
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.
For years scientists used a rodent model to interrogate how uterine contractions work, which turned out to be the wrong model; scientists used the heart as a model organ to try to elucidate how electricity moves in the uterus and makes it contract, but that too, was the wrong model.
The uterus is sui generis, it's own unique organ that, according to Dr. Roger Young, is in the last decade, becoming better understood; His company is working on making a fetal monitor to better assess when labor is in fact happening, by measuring the pressure changes in the uterus, a statistic that's critical to understanding labor progression. Keep listening to better understand how your uterus actually works.
To see some of Dr. Young's academic work: see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=roger+young+uterus