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
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 circumstances require it often in the form of a miscarriage, miscarriage rates on average are pretty high.
Something like one in four suspected, and that's just of the embryos that actually get implanted. An estimated 60% of embryos never make it past. The sensors in the uterine lining. Miscarriages tend to congregate around the first trimester. Something like 80% of them happen then. And the largest fraction of those is seemingly related to aneuploidy.
When cells that make up the embryo have the wrong number of chromosomes. So the question is. How does it work, when it works, and what happens when it goes wrong?