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 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.
What these research physicians are doing is making use of a retinal scan--taking pictures of the tiny vessels at the back of your eye and measuring changes in these vessels to predict a number of significant issues in fertility and pregnancy.
Through the lucky marriage of improvements in imaging tech and the harvesting and analysis of big data scientists have birthed a field, maybe yet to be fully named, but what I saw called oculomics--(sounds a little too much like a bond villian) which is using biomarkers from pictures of the eye to predict systemic disease. What makes this particularly useful is that often issues show up in the microvasculature, these tiny vessels, before it shows up in more obvious clinical symptoms, giving us something like an advance warning, and potentially time to react.
Dr. Li's 2024 paper: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8677435/