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
Why Postpartum is not the "opposite" of pregnancy: Conversation with Dr. Uri Alon
If we wanted to bury the phrase “bounce back” to describe our expectation about how a body should respond in postpartum, I think today’s conversation can effectively do that.
I talk to a researcher who has gathered the largest sample of data about women, before, during and after pregnancy, tracking 76 different lab values for 300,000 women between 2003 and 2020. His work shows the significant changes to physiology during pregnancy, and importantly, how long it takes different physical aspects to recover from pregnancy.
Spoiler alert: the vast majority of tests take more than 3 months to recover.
We’ll also talk about how some complications may well be related to preexisting issues, as seen in the preconception labs.
You can find more of Dr. Alon's work here: https://www.weizmann.ac.il/mcb/alon/
The previous episode that examines a blood biomarker for depression with Dr. Jennifer Payne: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/can-we-predict-postpartum-depression-from-inside-the/id1779600854?i=1000711126548