Double X Science - It's In Your Genes

Search Results for: label/preterm birth

  • The vaginal ecosystem.

    …g announcement says. “Preterm infants are at increased risk of life-long disability, poor health, and early death compared with infants born later in pregnancy.” Nearly one in eight children were born prematurely in the US in 2009 (12.18%). Beyond the emotional toll on families, preterm birth also imposes a serious financial cost. “A report by the Institute of Medicine estimated that the annual societal economic burden associated with preterm bir…

    Authored by on February 25, 2013

  • We can’t stop preterm births. Can we do more for preterm babies?

    Baby girl born at 26 weeks, 6 days of gestation,weighing less than 2 pounds. Via Wikimedia Commons.Credit: Chris Sternal-Johnson. by Emily Willingham, DXS managing editor Today, Carolyn S. Miles, president and CEO at Save the Children writes at the Huffington Post (ducks) about the latest findings regarding our ability to stop a preterm birth from happening. As anyone who’s given birth knows, it’s not easy to stop that proc…

    Authored by on November 16, 2012

  • DXS Op-Ed: How birth control can save the world

    …over the last 50 years, reaching 7 the billion mark in March of this year.  This is an astounding statistic since it took until 1804 – around 50,000 years – to reach our first billion.  World Population: 1800 – 2100 (Wikimedia Commons) What makes these numbers really scary is the concept of carrying capacity, which is an ecological term used to describe the maximum number of individual members of a species that a certain habita…

    Authored by on May 2, 2012

  • Women know something you don’t

    Make no mistake about it. by Emily Willingham Three of my four grandparents were only children. Born early in the 20th century, in the period betwixt the great wars, coming of age in the Great Depression. Only children, in spite of having parents married for decades. Three of them. In all likelihood, their own parents, my great-grandparents–and I knew all of my great-grandmothers–consciously chose not to have more children because,…

    Authored by on March 26, 2013

  • Is there a season for births?

    …t of superstitious people might actively avoid the 13th of any month to escape giving their child an ‘unlucky’ number for a birthday. Does scheduling delivery really affect annual birth patterns? Actually, yes – the fact that 22% of labors are induced means selecting specific days for a birth, and those choices tend to be weekdays. In fact, there is a strong “weekday bias” in births that dates back to the 1930s, when the trend for hav…

    Authored by on February 18, 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

  • Pregnancy 101: My placenta looked like meatloaf, but I wasn’t about to eat it.

    …of us are involved in policing the neighborhoods, some of us build structures, some of us communicate information, some of us deal with food, some of us get rid of waste, etc.  Every cell gets a job (it’s the only example of 100% employment rates!). Now back to the cells in the fertilized egg.  As they start to learn what their specific job will be, the cells within the sphere will start to organize themselves.  After about 5 days after fertil…

    Authored by on July 27, 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

  • Biology Explainer: The big 4 building blocks of life–carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and nucleic acids

    …molecules themselves break down into a surprisingly small number of building blocks. The proteins that make up all of the living things on this planet and ensure their appropriate structure and smooth function consist of only 20 different kinds of building blocks. Nucleic acids, specifically DNA, are even more basic: only four different kinds of molecules provide the materials to build the countless different genetic codes that translate into all…

    Authored by on June 8, 2012

  • About that pacifier study…

    …moms gave birth vaginally. There was still a lower risk of eczema among the pacifier-sucking parents’ kids, but there also was a lower risk of eczema among those born vaginally, regardless of pacifier cleaning methods: 20% of the kids born vaginally whose parents cleaned pacifiers with their mouths had eczema 31% of the kids who were born vaginally or had mouth-cleaned pacifiers had eczema 54% of the kids born by C section whose parents ne…

    Authored by on May 8, 2013

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