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Strollerderby
When was the last time you stopped and remembered what a miracle your children are?
It’s one of those count your blessings and go hug your kids kind of stories.
When Dawn Flemming, 35, was still pregnant six months ago, her baby daughter was given no chance of survival because of a mango-sized tumor that stretched the length of her neck. Doctors explained that it blocked the baby’s pencil-thin airways, which would make it impossible for her to breathe once it became detached from the placenta.
Since she wasn’t able to get a legal abortion at that point, Dawn sought a second opinion, and she ended up signing up for a rare and risky surgery at New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center, where doctors partially delivered her baby through a c-section 10 weeks later and inserted a tube into her airways, which enabled the baby to breathe on her own.
When I was pregnant with my son, I was very aware that living in Los Angeles, I wasn’t exactly breathing clean mountain air.
Doctors used to think of the placenta as a perfect barrier — a mom-to-baby filtering system that allowed all the good stuff to pass and kept the bad stuff out. Now we know that’s not true at all: air pollutants, pesticides, plastics chemicals — when scientists take sample of a baby’s umbilical cord after birth, they find evidence of hundreds of unsavory elements.
That doesn’t mean they are all damaging, of course. Scientists like Federica Perera at the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health are trying to measure how the chemicals in mom’s world actually affect the life growing in her womb.
Here’s the latest piece of the puzzle. To give you a hint, it doesn’t make me feel good about living in the land of six lane highways: Continue reading »
Getting on an exam table saved this woman from a 30-year-long pregnancy!
A Haitian woman has had a 30-year-old petrified fetus successfully removed from her abdomen at a hospital in the Dominican Republic. The condition is an extremely rare one known as a “stone baby” or lithopedion. Only about 300 have been recorded in medical history.
The 59-year-old women saw a doctor about acute abdominal pain she had suffered for decades, only to learn that she had been carrying a fetus for at least 3 decades.
The unfolding story of BPA
The journal BMC Developmental Biology has published a study by French researchers that shows bisphenol A to have a surprising effect on vertebrate embryos.
A large body of research already tells us that BPA (in plastics, food packaging and more) has a likely effect on reproductive development, since it is considered an endocrine disrupter — interacting with the body’s hormone system.
That has especially poignant implications for pregnant women.
But the scientists conducting this study found BPA affected embryos in a way that had nothing to do with reproduction. Here’s what they found: Continue reading »
Surgery for the tiniest patients
Yesterday, a much-anticipated study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that doctors were able to successfully perform surgery on fetuses with spina bifida — with remarkable benefits to the children later in life.
With spina bifida, the backbone and spinal canal do not close during fetal development, so the spinal cord and nerves are exposed. Babies born with spina bifida can be paralyzed in the lower half of their bodies, or have their brain stems squeezed into the top of the spinal column. Developmental delays and conditions like hydrocephalus (a build up of fluid in the skull) are common.
Standard treatment has been surgery after birth, but according to The New York Times coverage of the study, since the late 1990′s certain hospitals have been trying to perform surgeries while a baby is still in utero.
Fetal surgery is risky and delicate, so normally it’s used only when the fetus is at risk of dying. Babies with spina bifida do not commonly die, so doctors weren’t sure if going under the knife while still in the womb was worth it.
Turns out, it’s so effective that a safety board stopped the study early so that babies who weren’t scheduled to have the surgery could receive it. Here’s why: Continue reading »
Over the last few days, science writers Amanda Schaffer and Annie Murphy Paul have been having a fascinating exchange about Paul’s new book Origins: How The Nine Months Before Birth Shape The Rest Of Our Lives.
The two writers dissect studies of how a mom’s behavior, diet, and environment affect her baby, but they also pull apart big ideas about evolution and the push and pull between mom and fetus.
As we know, when pregnancy studies make the news we often see big, flashy, guilt-inducing headlines, but Paul makes the distinction between small studies that we should approach with skepticism and those that are large and well-designed.
For example, a study published in the Lancet in 2007 looked at 12,000 women and found those who eat less than 12 oz of seafood per week are more likely to have children with increased risk for low verbal IQ, social and communication problems, and poor fine motor skills.
Another substantial study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology found that women who gain more weight in pregnancy, even within the 25-35 pound guidelines, are more likely to have a heavier three year old.
But according to Paul, it’s not just about isolated variables like fish and pregnancy weight. What’s going on around the woman during pregnancy — the greater environmental conditions — shape what’s going on in the womb.
For example, in times of extreme stress (like in the wake of an earthquake), fewer boys are born. Why would that be? Continue reading »
Most of us would agree that males and females respond differently to stressful situations. While boys might cope by ignoring a problem and waiting for it to resolve itself, girls tend to respond by taking action and attempting do something about it. And while these responses are generalized and may even sound like stereotypes, research has found that there is some biological truth here. In fact, the differences in male and female responses to stress was recently documented in the womb! Continue reading »
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