Aurora magazine

Men whose mothers have been very stressed in the first 18 months of gestation are less fertile. The discovery comes from the Western Australia's Raine Study, a multigenerational study conducted on men between 20 and 30 years old.

According to the researchers, the male reproductive organs are particularly vulnerable in the first weeks of gestation. To prove it, between 1989 and 1991 they recruited nearly 3,000 women at the 18th week of gestation. During these years, they submitted questionnaires to them about any stressful events that occurred just before conception and in its early stages. The questions included death, divorce, marital problems, loss of work, financial problems.

The participants gave birth to 2868 children, of which 1454 boys. Of these, 643 have continued to participate in the study to date. The researchers examined their reproductive functions with testicular ultrasound examinations and sperm analysis. In a second step, they crossed the data collected with the answers given by mothers during gestation, looking for possible links between fertility and maternal psychological conditions. 63% of men had been exposed to at least one traumatic event in prenatal age, at the earliest stages of gestation.

The tests showed that they have less sperm and less motility. To make the results more precise, the researchers also took into account other factors that could affect reproductive health, not related to maternal health. Even excluding other variables, men exposed to very stressful events in the early stages of life have 36% less sperm. Furthermore, motility is 12% lower and testosterone levels are reduced by 11%. There is therefore the possibility that maternal psychological health can really damage or improve the future fertility of children.

Source: eshre.eu

Small fainting has always been considered a pregnancy symptom in the early stages. A new study sheds new light on the phenomenon, which could be linked to health problems for the mother and the child.

Researchers from the Universities of Alberta and Calgary analyzed the birth records of 481,930 children, all born between 2005 and 2014. During the study, they also examined the medical records of mothers during and one year after birth, looking for any cases of fainting. About 1% of women had had such cases, about a third in the first trimester of pregnancy.

The cases of fainting in the first trimester were linked to a higher rate of preterm parts. A higher than average number of children was found to have heart problems and the mothers had further cases of fainting. The phenomenon also seems to be linked to a greater number of congenital anomalies, especially when there have been multiple fainting. Fainting is temporary loss of consciousness, usually caused by a drop in pressure and a lack of oxygen in the brain.

Pregnancy hormones can accelerate the heartbeat and relax the blood vessels, causing the aforementioned fainting. The phenomenon should be reported to your doctor, to increase controls and reduce the risk of any negative consequences. According to the authors of the study, fainting could indicate a greater predisposition to cardiovascular diseases. They should therefore be treated as more than an anecdotal event.

Source: folio.ca

Many parents with children with developmental problems are also afraid of any pregnancies to come. In some cases, it is possible to use prenatal screening tests. What to do instead when dealing with hereditary diseases?

In some families there is a 50% chance that the second child will also have problems, although mutations are not present in either parent. For this reason, the team led by Dr. Ummi Abdullah is developing a way to identify such cases. His study aims to identify couples at high risk, calculating the so-called "recurrence risk".

The focus of the study is on families with at least one sick child, in which, however, neither parent is a healthy carrier of the mutation. According to the team, mutations could only be present in spermatozoa and oocytes, escaping normal genetic testing. The phenomenon is called gonadal mosaicism.

The researchers analyzed the tissues of 20 families, derived from both parents and children. The analyzes revealed some cases of mosaicism in the parents, the most serious of which deriving from the mother. The genetic mutations of this type inherited from the father, on the other hand, seem to have a far lesser recurrence.

For now, the test can give a reliable answer to about 3 out of 4 couples. However, further studies will be needed to prove the validity of the procedure, which is why clinical trials are still ongoing.

Source: medicalxpress.com

Starting in the first trimester, the woman's body begins to produce a hormone called relaxin. The hormone helps the expectant mother to loosen muscles, joints and ligaments. In this way the body makes less effort to adapt to the growing child. A multidisciplinary team from the BIMDC (Department of Orthopedic Surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) studied the effects of relaxin on patients with arthrofibrosis.

The study starts from the observation of some pregnant patients. Some women suffering from the disease reported a reduction in pain both during gestation and immediately afterwards. The doctors looked for a possible cause of the phenomenon, focusing on the production of relaxin. At this point, they decided to check whether their suspicions were founded or not.

The doctors injected human relaxin into the joints of some guinea pigs. The animals suffered from a painful form of arthrofibrosis, which prevented them from using their shoulders. This is a particularly debilitating variant, common especially among middle-aged and diabetic women. The guinea pigs treated in this way have recovered much of their mobility; tissue samples showed improvement even at the cellular level. In a second study, the team analyzed relaxin-2. This version of the hormone inhibits the production of scar tissue by lowering the levels of collagen which, in excessive quantities, accelerates the phenomenon.

Injections made with relaxin-2 brought more significant and even more lasting improvements. One of the next steps will be to test the effects of the hormone on humans, but further tests will be needed first.

Source: bidmc.harvard.edu