Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

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  • Xplainer: How do you date a pregnancy?

    …lopment = embryological age (e.g., developmental biologist) 2 But why are there two types of dates? We might need a bit of a primer on the menstrual cycle and how it relates to pregnancy. Implantation happens between days 20 and 22. Pregnancy is often detected after the first missed period. This graphic is intentionally simple, removing all the hormones and other fun stuff (Ed: which you can find here). You’ll note that it says approximately…

    Authored by on October 3, 2012

  • Pregnancy 101: Peas made me puke, but not just in the morning

    …ing. What is morning sickness? Tick-tock. Credit: Jeanne Garbarino It has long been known that nausea and vomiting are common symptoms of pregnancy. In fact, documentation of this phenomenon goes as far back as 2000 BC. However, the term “morning sickness” is a complete misnomer. For one, pregnancy-related nausea and vomiting is not just a morning thing. It can happen at any time of day. Second, the term “sickness” suggests a state…

    Authored by on February 14, 2012

  • Pregnancy 101: It Hurts Where?

    …ated pelvic girdle pain comes from the bony joints in the pelvis, which can in turn cause pain and dysfunction in the surrounding muscles. These problems can appear during or after pregnancy. Studies report that approximately 20 percent of women experience these symptoms with pregnancy. For most women, the pain goes away within a few months of childbirth. But for somewhere between 7 and 10 percent of them, it doesn’t. A combination of factors app…

    Authored by on February 10, 2013

  • Pregnancy 101: The science behind the wand of destiny

    …om laughing so hard, let us get back to the science. The first “slice of bread” is called the reaction zone, the “sandwich filling” is called the test zone, and the “last slice of bread” is called the control zone (see figure 2). Each of these zones is coated with capture antibodies, but differ from each other in how they work.  The antibodies on the reaction zone will capture only hCG and will detach from the strip upon exposure to urine. The…

    Authored by on November 26, 2011

  • Miscarriage: When a beginning is not a beginning

    …ntaneous abortion. Except that some didn’t like the term spontaneous abortion and used intrauterine mortality (Wood, 1994). Or fetal loss. Fetal loss is probably the most common. There is also pregnancy loss (Holman and Wood, 2001). You can use that term, too. Oh, or a-conceptions (a for abortion), compared to l-conceptions (l for live birth) (Wood, 1994). A large number of these fetal losses are before or close to the time of implantation. For m…

    Authored by on September 5, 2012

  • Dating research update

    …erences cited within) romantic love at least once in our lives, and can attest to multiple stages with different feelings involved. In order to measure two distinct but not mutually exclusive states, the authors propose a new 20-item Infatuation and Attachment Scales questionnaire. Dutch and Welsh study participants were asked to rate their levels of agreement on a 7-point Likert scale to questions serving as proxies for each state. For example,…

    Authored by on January 31, 2013

  • Hormonal birth control explainer: a matter of health

    …ich exists to prepare an egg for fertilization and to make the uterine lining ready to receive a fertilized egg, should it arrive.  Fig. 1. Female reproductive anatomy. Credit: Jeanne Garbarino. In the theoretical 28-day cycle, fertilization (fusion of sperm and egg), if it occurs, will happen about 14 days in, timed with ovulation , or release of the egg from the ovary into the Fallopian tube or oviduct (see video–watch fo…

    Authored by on March 5, 2012

  • Childbirth and C-sections in pre-modern times

    …y down the pelvic canal, with its skull bones eventually sliding around and overlapping to get through the pelvis.  Culturally, we have another way to deliver these large babies: the so-called caesarean section . Up until the 20th century, childbirth was dangerous.  Even today, in some less developed countries, roughly 1 maternal death occurs for every 100 live births, most of those related to obstructed labor or hemorrhage ( WHO Fact Sheet 2010…

    Authored by on July 2, 2012

  • Pregnancy 101: On the cervical mucus plug and why I’ve never been more happy to hold something so disgusting in my hand

    Like the eye of Sauron drawn to the One Ring, one cannot resist looking at the mucus plug. June 3rd, 2007 fell on a Sunday. I awoke that morning feeling disappointed that I was still pregnant. My due date had come and gone and, honestly, I was sick of being a human incubator. I had enough of the heartburn, involuntary peeing, and the overall beached-whale feeling. The baby in utero was resting comfortably on my sciatic nerve, and I cou…

    Authored by on December 29, 2011

  • HIV+ doesn’t mean you can’t have children

    …is gay. To their credit, both parents soon rose to the occasion. Angela and her spouse have a healthy toddler, and the grandparents love spending time with him. Angela’s story isn’t everyone’s story. The hubbub at the recent 20th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections was not on the “functional cure” of the baby born to a pregnant woman with HIV, but on why, in this day and age, the mother doesn’t seem to have received the recom…

    Authored by on March 11, 2013

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