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
37 episodes
The Science of Periods: What's really going on in your Uterus
This week we will focus on what in G-ds good name is going on in the uterus during your cycle. I don’t think I’m going too far out on a ledge to say that most of us consider our period an inconvenience at best, but when you hear some of the det...
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20:17
What is the role of the Corpus Luteum in reproductive health and fertility: Conversation with Dr. Kirk Conrad
Pregnancy can appear smooth when everything, or nearly everything goes according to plan--basically. But if you're part of the group of people for which it has not gone smoothly, in pursuit of what may have gone wrong, you find that this proces...
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45:28
The backstory of the Unsung Hero of Early Pregnancy: the Corpus Luteum
This week’s episode is the ‘Making Sense of Pregnancy’ version of the broadway play (and now movie) Wicked: it provides the back story of a critical character in pregnancy that you likely didn’t know enough about. It also ...
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17:21
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 sampl...
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33:58
Can we predict miscarriage with an activity tracker? Conversation with Professor Benjamin Smarr, Part II
When it comes to categorizing pregnant women as high or low risk, we leave so much information on the table--which keeps us limited to the model where doctors use broad averages to triage care for pregnant women. Age is a definitive way to cate...
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Season 1
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29:00
Can an activity tracker tell you if you are pregnant? Conversation with Professor Benjamin Smarr, Part I
In the olden days, women measured something called basal body temperature (BBT), which is core temperature, to track ovulation by measuring their temperature right when they wake up--it's the first thing you'd do-- with a special thermometer th...
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24:57
Many long held ideas about Placental Development are wrong: a conversation with Dr. Graham Burton, PhD
The uterus has really lurked in the shadows of gestational research. We imagined that it was just a place where the fertilized egg decided to settle and grow. But recent research has recast the uterus in a more prominent role. ...
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34:29
What triggers labor?: Conversation with Dr. Polina Lishko, Part 2
The how and when of uterine contractions--how are uterine contractions initiated? Whats the trigger or triggers? And when it happens too early, why does it happen too early? are questions we haven't been able to answer as of yet.
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23:44
Turning labor on and off: the identification of a trigger: Conversation with Dr. Polina Lishko, PhD, part I
One of the big unknowns in pregnancy, and there are many, is what initiates labor. Researchers point to many different possible triggers, and likely it is some combination of signals from the placenta, the fetus and the mother that kick of...
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23:45
How the Uterine Environment Shapes the Baby's Long term Health
Today we are all about fetal programming. It's also known as the Barker Hypothesis or Fetal Origins of Health and Disease. This theory suggests that the uterine environment can impact not just immediate health for the baby, but long-term health...
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23:37
Can we predict Postpartum Depression from inside the Third Trimester: Conversation with Dr. Jennifer Payne
It should not ALSO be a mother's job to catch her own depression after delivery.In pregnancy care in the future, imagine if you walked into your OBs office in your third trimester and you got a blood test that could predict how likely yo...
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27:06
How to Make a Placenta: A User's Guide
This week's episode is kind of a how to episode. It's how do you grow a placenta, an entirely new organ, and quickly. Probably a more accurate title would be how do we think we might grow a placenta? How does a placenta develop? Maybe because ...
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22:36
What would it look like to predict Postpartum Hemorrhage? A Conversation with Christine Rohan & Dr. James Weimer
I admit that I love a cross over event, especially when it comes to pregnancy and birth research. Today's crossover involves the use of sports medicine to think about issues that come up in delivery. In particular, we'll talk to both the CEO an...
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33:58
A 3-D model of a placenta (on-a-chip): Conversation with Dr. Colin Murdoch
The human placenta is a superhero of organs. It's a master regulator of hormones, a negotiator with the maternal immune system, and capable of adapting structurally and metabolically--in real time--to changes in it's environment to cater to the...
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29:13
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