An estimated 132 million babies were born across the globe last year — really just a drop in the bucket when you think about the over 100 billion babies born since modern humans first lived on Earth 200,000 years ago. And until very recently we had few tools to understand how they were doing in the womb, how they would fare in the days after birth, and how a pregnant person would change physically and mentally not just during pregnancy but in the months and years that followed. Things have changed dramatically, particularly over the last decade, in terms of the care and technology that’s available preconception, during pregnancy, and post-birth. But there is still so much we don’t know about these time periods, both for baby and mom, and many a black box remains.
Transcript of this Episode
Sam Jones: An estimated 132 million babies were born across the globe last year — really just a drop in the bucket when you think about the over 100 billion babies born since modern humans first lived on Earth 200,000 years ago. That’s a whole lotta babies! And until very recently we had few tools to understand how they were doing in the womb, how they would fare in the days after birth, and how a pregnant person would change physically and mentally not just during pregnancy but in the months and years that followed. I mean, did you know the first fetal ultrasound image wasn’t published until 1958? And even when I see the one ultrasound that was taken of me as a fetus 36 years ago, that thing was grainy. Whereas, a few months ago, I was able to see a high-def video of the 4 chambers of my baby’s heart pumping blood.
Things have changed dramatically, particularly over the last decade, in terms of the care and technology that’s available preconception, during pregnancy, and post-birth. But there is still so much we don’t know about these time periods, both for baby and mom, and many a black box remains.
Sam: Welcome to Tiny Matters, a science podcast about the little things that have a big impact on our society, past and present. I’m Sam Jones and I'm joined by my co-host Deboki Chakravarti.
Before being pregnant there were a lot of things I just took for granted about fetal development, childbirth and postpartum, but once I was, the scientist in me went into overdrive with curiosity but also of course that could be unnecessarily stressful at times. Deboki, were you super curious about everything when you were pregnant or did you just try not to think about it?
Deboki: Yeah, I think it was a mix of both. It was impossible to not wonder about what was going on because there is so much. Also there was a limit to how I could wonder because if I wondered too hard I would get stressed it was a lot to process at once.
So today we have an episode for you that is split into two parts. In the first part, we’re going to chat with a researcher whose work focuses on neonatal development and improving the health outcomes of babies born prematurely. Then we’ll switch gears and hear from a neuroscientist about some very cool new data on changes to a mom’s brain during pregnancy, some of which seem to stick around for years, and even maybe forever.
Sam: We reached out to neonatologist Karen Mestan who is the chief of the Division of Neonatology in the Department of Pediatrics at Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego and UC San Diego School of Medicine. Before hopping into her research, we kicked things off by asking her just a couple questions about things I kept wondering about childbirth, because I just couldn’t help myself. The first was how birth means that a baby transitions quickly from living in a liquid environment to breathing air. It feels like a fish out of water situation but, of course, we have lungs not gills.
Karen Mestan: If you think of the lungs like a balloon or a sponge, there's all these little airways in there that are fluid filled. And they take that first breath, there's all this pressure that's actually inflating the lungs, and then the fluid gets pushed out and it gets displaced with air.
Sam with Karen Mestan: And the fluid just kind of… do babies cough it up or…where does it go?
Karen Mestan: Yeah. Well, that's one way, also the body resorbs it too. So there are different hormones that influence the body resorption of the fluid as well. So it's not all coming out of the lungs. And it's interesting because we don't see babies kind of coughing up fluid. So there probably is some transition where some of that is probably already happening before the baby's born, that the fluid is slowly starting to be removed and displaced by air.
Deboki: That’s wild that their body is reabsorbing some of that fluid! And another thing we were wondering about is jaundice — the yellowing of the skin that you frequently see with newborns.
Sam: Yeah I’m pretty sure I had jaundice for a few days when I was born. Again, never really thought about it until I was about to have a baby.
Deboki: Yeah, I had jaundice too when I was a baby, and my mom still talks about sticking me under a blue light. So because my only real frame of reference for having a baby was what I was like when I was born, I expected my son to have jaundice too, but that wasn’t the case. So we asked Karen what causes it. She told us there are different forms of jaundice, and although it can occasionally indicate a serious issue, in newborns, the most common form of jaundice clears up on its own and is caused by mom and baby’s blood mixing in pregnancy and childbirth. If their bloods aren’t the same type — for instance mom is type A- and baby is type B- — it can be an issue.
Karen Mestan: So based on your blood type, you have certain antibodies to other blood types. So if those antibodies get to the baby and the baby has a different blood type, they will start breaking down the blood cells in the baby. So it's kind of like an immune response. And so when you break down the red blood cells, that is called hemolysis, that's when you produce the chemical of bilirubin, and that's what causes the jaundice in babies.
Deboki: Bilirubin is a yellow compound that is produced, like Karen said, when red blood cells are broken down. The bilirubin will travel to the liver and then be excreted out in poop. But if a lot of it builds up in the blood or the liver can’t get rid of it, it will cause jaundice.
Karen told us it usually works its way out on its own within a few days, but if not, there are options like the blue light therapy that I went through. Blue light therapy, sometimes referred to as “bili lights,” uses a wavelength of light that can break down bilirubin into a form that the baby can excrete. In very rare cases babies may need a blood transfusion, because if levels of bilirubin in the blood continue to stay high, the compound can cross the blood brain barrier and be deposited into brain tissue, which can lead to brain damage. But I want to stress that this is incredibly rare.
Sam: OK, so once we got those couple curiosity questions in we wanted to chat with Karen about her work with premature infants.
Karen Mestan: So I think the main driver throughout my career and being at the bedside and treating premature and critically ill babies, is the whole question of why some babies do extremely well that are very sick in the first couple days or weeks of life, and then why some babies don't fare so well.
A lot of times we're very surprised. We see a baby born and think, oh, this baby's going to have a lot of trouble. And despite all the things that we do for these babies in the ICU, I also see these babies two years, five years down the line, and it's pretty amazing how resilient they are. And then there's also some who don't do very well, and we see a lot of disease and also death in newborn babies and children, which is really hard to see. And so a big driver for me is, by knowing what makes babies resilient, can we apply that to the babies that don't fare well in order to give them a better chance?
Deboki: A huge percentage of infants born extremely preterm develop bronchopulmonary dysplasia, or BPD. In fact, a large study found that 67.4% of infants born at less than 24 weeks had BPD and nearly 30% of those born at 27 to 28 weeks had it. BPD is a chronic lung disease that often arises following use of supplemental oxygen or ventilation to help get oxygen to the preemie. But these artificial systems can damage lung tissue, specifically the tiny air sacs in the lungs called alveoli.
Karen, who has now been in the field for 30 years, remembers realizing, even early on in her career, that regardless of the treatment received by a preemie in the NICU, there was likely something happening in the womb that was helping set some babies up for success more than others.
Karen Mestan: That kind of got me thinking, well, it must be something before they're born that programs their lung development, their brain, all the other organ systems, and so we need to look at those factors to help us inform how to treat the babies after they're born.
Sam: Karen and her lab are focused on identifying biomarkers, whether they be biochemical, genetic, or environmental, that could predict or prevent BPD as well as hypertension in high-risk infants.
Karen Mestan: And so that led me to looking at the placenta as a marker of what's going on before birth. And that led me to look at cord blood as kind of markers of what the placental function was during that period, the months to weeks before the baby was born.
Sam: Cord blood comes from the umbilical cord, which connects the developing fetus and the placenta during pregnancy, and Karen and her colleagues collect it just after the baby is born. Cord blood is rich not just with blood but also immune and stem cells. We recently did an episode about the placenta and how important it is for fetal development, and we’ll link to it in the show notes. Knowing that placental insufficiency, where the organ isn’t delivering enough blood to the fetus, is strongly tied to BPD, has led Karen to look in cord blood for biomarkers to help predict how a premature infant will do and what care will best set them up for success.
Because, as of right now, there’s no sure-fire way of predicting or preventing BPD.
Karen Mestan: I think that's a conundrum that we have. I mean, there have been advances in neonatology over the last 20 years, like better ventilation, the use of steroids to reduce inflammation and promote lung growth. So there have been several things that have been established over the years, just even the uniformity of care that we give extremely preterm babies. But interestingly, the rate of BPD, the incidence of BPD over the past 20 years has not gone down. And we think it's probably because now our technology, we have better technology to resuscitate and stabilize lower gestational age babies.
Deboki: That means babies born many months early are surviving, which is incredible and wouldn’t have been possible in the past. But Karen told us that, if we really want to help all of these premature infants to our best ability, their care needs to be more personalized. We should be asking questions like, “How long should they be on a ventilator?” “Should they receive a steroid treatment, and for how long?” or “Do they need to be inhaling nitric oxide, which helps relax blood vessels in the lungs?” And she’s confident that the work she’s doing will help us get there.
Sam: There is so much we could cover in terms of fetal and neonatal development and if you’re like “we want more of that! I have questions!” write to us. We will make it happen. But now we’re going to switch gears, and talk about pregnancy brain. I’m not referencing the forgetfulness or difficulty concentrating that some people report during pregnancy — I’m talking about literal changes to the structures in mom’s brain.
Deboki: It has definitely been wild to feel like my brain has shifted since I’ve had a baby, and I’m sure some of that is the months of sleep deprivation that I’m still recovering from. But it also feels like there’s just something fundamentally different in my brain, and I’ve talked to other people who have given birth who feel the same way. So we spoke with Emily Jacobs, a professor of neuroscience at UC Santa Barbara who directs the Ann S. Bowers Women's Brain Health Initiative where, she says, the goal is to build the largest and most comprehensive collection of brain imaging data for women's health.
Emily Jacobs: For me, finding the brain was really something that I found in college. I took a neuroscience class almost by mistake. My best friend who would later become a neuroscientist herself had it on her schedule. And I was like, oh, that sounds interesting. And I popped in and was blown away by lecture one… It was like one course in, I was obsessed. This felt like the next big frontier.
Deboki: Emily told us that, when she was in college in the early 2000s, MRI or Magnetic Resonance Imaging was entering its heyday. MRI captures detailed images of the brain using a magnetic field and radio waves.
Emily Jacobs: We sort of wrestled it from the bowels of medical schools in the 1990s where it had been used clinically. But then the psychologists really took it over as this tool for understanding how the human brain works when it's healthy or what goes wrong when it's not. And that was really, that wave was starting to crest or felt like it was cresting when I was in college.
Deboki: After college, Emily went to grad school with the goal of studying with the best brain imager at the time. She ended up at UC Berkeley with neuroscientist Mark D’Esposito, where he and his lab were trying to understand the role of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays an essential role in our brain’s reward system. New to the lab, Emily was trying to catch up on as much of the literature as possible, and she came across a small body of work related to the importance of gonadal hormones — hormones secreted by our reproductive organs — particularly estrogen. Estrogen was apparently playing an important role in dopamine synthesis and release in the mammalian brain.
Emily Jacobs: And I was blown away because nobody was asking questions at the human level about sex differences in dopamine trajectories, let alone kind of endocrine modulation of these things. And so that got me hooked, but it also set me on this path towards realizing, you know, I think as students often were taught about the literature that's there, and I quickly learned to read for the negative space, what is, the literature that's not there. And that's in grad school when I sort of had this awakening that there's so many questions that we have yet to explore that matter for women's health. I don't want to sort of force a false dichotomy between the male brain and the female brain. It's just the mammalian brain. But by ignoring health factors that are specific to women or unique to women like menstrual cycle or pregnancy or menopause, we are missing fundamental aspects of neurobiology that could matter for everybody's health if we could understand them.
Sam: So let’s start with the hormonal changes leading up to pregnancy.
Emily Jacobs: To get to pregnancy, you have to have a menstrual cycle, right? And so during the menstrual cycle, there's this coordinated release of hormones. Hormones are not static. It's not just like you have this chronic level all of the time. There are these ebbs and flows and this pulse of the menstrual cycle or even the circadian cycle that all sexes and genders will experience. These pulses are almost like a vital sign. They drive physiological changes all throughout the body, but neuroscientists just really didn't have a good handle on how they influenced the brain, which is bonkers because the brain is an endocrine organ. The brain controls the release of hormones throughout the body from peripheral endocrine glands, and it responds to these hormones. So hormones use your circulatory system as their super highway. They travel through your bloodstream, they bind to receptors all over the body, including the brain to shape its function.
Sam: Emily told us that if you imagine the menstrual cycle as these sort of gentle undulations or waves of hormones, pregnancy is like a tsunami, with huge increases and decreases in hormones depending on the stage. And those will cause physiological changes in different systems. Your immune system, for instance, needs to continue to protect you from pathogens but also needs to be tamped down a bit so that the developing fetus with its foreign DNA isn’t rejected. Your cardiovascular system also changes — your blood volume increases to account for all of the metabolic changes that are happening, which can make a pregnant person feel a lot warmer than usual. There are also, of course, changes to the central nervous system, including the brain, which is Emily’s focus.
Deboki: For decades, studies related to the pregnant brain were limited to animal models. There is still incredible work going on there, for instance showing that changes within a region of the brain called the hypothalamus can lead to the onset of behaviors postpartum that, at least in a rodent model, are the difference between life and death.
Emily Jacobs: If those maternal behaviors don't kick in, the litters won't get licked and groomed, they won't nest build, that whole suite of behaviors that will determine the success of the offspring is critical and are governed by gonadal hormones. So those sort of circuits have been and are still being worked out in really beautiful experimental settings in animals. In humans, this literature is probably 10 years old, and it really started with beautiful study in 2017, so maybe not even 10 years old, by Elseline Hoekzema, Susanna Carmona, and a group in Spain.
Deboki: The researchers tracked a group of women preconception and postpartum, taking a snapshot of what their brains looked like before and after pregnancy. They saw that these women's brains after pregnancy, compared to men or women who hadn’t been pregnant, were different, and even two years post-pregnancy those changes remained.
Emily Jacobs: That really gave birth to this whole field of matrescence within neurobiology. Now, matrescence is a term adopted from anthropology, but now neuroscience is really starting to think of this phase as another period of plasticity for the human brain. And it has sort of a wink to adolescence, another period where hormones flood the system and there's this very specific kind of cortical refinement that happens in the brain during that period of time. We think matrescence might be something similar where hormones come in and they sculpt the brain and it's not willy-nilly, it seems to be in this very directed manner.
Deboki: Emily told us there are now over a dozen research groups around the world studying this fascinating brain plasticity that happens during pregnancy. And, inspired by the 2017 work, she and her lab also decided to dig deeper.
Emily Jacobs: We had that really foundational study in humans taking a snapshot of the brain pre and postpartum, and we said, well, why don't we come in and use our kind of precision lens or dense sampling lens to really understand what's happening during pregnancy itself.
Deboki: They began with one participant, who was given an MRI scan starting preconception and then every two weeks throughout the gestational window up to two years postpartum.
Emily Jacobs: And from that, we were able to really look at the time course of how the maternal brain changes in near real time on a week by week basis. And there's just these sweeping changes in gray matter volume, cortical thickness, white matter, microstructure, ventricular volume, and we can see it all unfold. So yeah, there's really just this choreographed dance or change across gestation. We're finally able to observe the process in real time.
Deboki: The most pronounced change was a decrease in gray matter volume. Gray matter makes up the outer layer of the brain and is rich in the cell bodies of neurons, which give it it’s coloring.
Emily Jacobs: And whenever anybody hears that, they sort of tense up, it's like “that cannot be a good thing.” And I wonder if that's the wrong way of thinking about it, because there's a whole other wave of development that happens earlier in life, which is also marked by this reduction in gray matter volume. Gray matter volume peaks at around age 10 in girls, 11 in boys, and then it comes down a little bit. While white matter pathways start to strengthen. You see sort of gray matter volume proliferate, and then this great pruning event happens.
Sam: Pruning is a really important thing the brain does to refine neural circuits and get rid of synaptic connections between neurons that it doesn’t need. Insufficient pruning has been linked to neurodevelopmental disorders including autism and ADHD.
Emily Jacobs: Another analogy that we can give is to think about it like Michelangelo’s David, where he starts off with this big hunk of marble and he chips away to reveal the underlying beauty. And it's in the art of removal that form manifests. And it's probably something similar where it's this cortical refinement that's happening across pregnancy. So part of the reason why we're doing this is because it's just cool that just from a basic science perspective, understanding the brain's capacity to display this level of neuroplasticity in its second, third, fourth decade of life is incredible.
Sam: But, Emily told us, as neuroscientists she and her colleagues are also driven to answer clinical questions.
Emily Jacobs: And so for us, trying to understand disorders that may be rooted in that period of time, like postpartum depression, preeclampsia, what are the effects on the maternal brain? Or can we use early signatures of the brain to even predict who's going to experience postpartum depression before it even manifests?
Sam: Yes, there are pharmaceuticals available for intervention in the case of preeclampsia and postpartum depression, but they’re not 100% effective and doctors have to wait until someone is sick before intervening. It would be incredible if they could take action before there’s a big issue.
Emily Jacobs: The future of the space for me is collaborative efforts, which means we can combine the power of things like precision imaging where we go in with total granularity, but also collect huge volumes of data so that we can look at diverse outcomes. So, you know, how does the brain change over second, third, fourth pregnancies? What does postpartum depression look like? How early can we push the detection of it based on proteomic data in the blood or brain signatures? If somebody has a hypertensive disorder in pregnancy, what does that mean for their risk of vascular dementia 30 years later?
Deboki: Emily told us all of these questions are just begging to be answered and she’s confident they can be.
Emily Jacobs: They're not impossible questions, and I say this a lot, but there's so much about the neurobiology of pregnancy we don't understand yet, and it's not because women are too complicated, it’s a consequence of the fact that we have just underinvested in this space. So I think there's going to be a thousand discoveries that get made if we continue to invest in women’s health.
Deboki: Should we tiny show and tell?
Sam: Yeah, I think we should.
Deboki: Okay. Sam, I'm here to tell you that surgeons at UCLA and USC have performed the first human bladder transplant.
Sam: Whoa.
Deboki: Yeah. Some of the people who might need bladder transplants or say people who have had cancer or basically needed to have their bladders removed for some reason, and so what usually ends up happening is they have a part of their intestines actually repurposed, and that repurposing transforms it so that they can pee using what's been reworked inside of their body. But this can also lead to complications. Your bowels, your intestines are largely dealing with poop, and so that's a part of your body that has a lot of bacteria, whereas when it comes to urine, that is relatively sterile, and so trying to repurpose it can lead to complications. And apparently it leads to complications in up to 80% of patients.
Sam: That's a lot.
Deboki: Yeah. These surgeons have been trying to figure out a strategy for a while. And I'll link to the New York Times article that is the basis for this tiny show and tell, because they go into a lot more detail about some of the steps that they needed to think through to make this transplant possible. But they ended up doing the surgery on a patient named Oscar Larinzar. And he had lost a lot of his bladder capacity because of the treatments he needed for bladder cancer. And the results so far have been really good. His kidney function has shown a lot of immediate improvements.
But I will say there were also questions from other doctors who were interviewed for this article about whether or not the benefits of a bladder transplant will outweigh the risk of needing to be on immunosuppressive drugs. Because obviously with transplants, you often need those immunosuppressive drugs to make sure the body doesn't reject the new organ. In the case of Larinzar, he was needing to take those immunosuppressive drugs anyway, so it's hard to extrapolate from this one case whether or not the benefits outweigh the risks because he was going to be on those drugs regardless. But the doctors are planning to do these transplants in four more patients to learn more about what's been working and figure things out before they can expand to a larger trial.
Sam: Wow. That's really cool. That's very exciting. Hopefully it goes well and the large trial goes well.
Deboki: Yeah. For sure.
Sam: Or the large trial happens because it does seem like the options now are very limited. And the fact that 80% of patients with the current strategy are getting... Yeah, our intestines are just teeming with so much bacteria, you could imagine at the very least someone's getting essentially a UTI constantly.
Deboki: Right. Yeah. One of the surgeons maybe or someone they interviewed in the article was basically saying... Their exact phrasing is, "Your bowels are inherently contaminated and your urinary tract is basically inherently sterile.
Sam: You don't want to mix those things.
Deboki: Yeah. Contradictory purposes there.
Sam: Yeah. Oh, fascinating. Well, I hope it works out. That's really cool. Amazing. Well, my tiny show and tell is actually pretty related to this episode.
Deboki: Is it a baby? That's it. Sorry.
Sam: I'm just like, "And here's a baby." No.
Deboki: Surprise.
Sam: But yeah, no, something that Emily talked about was understanding how the brain changes and maybe being able to, from understanding those changes, are being able to pinpoint certain particular changes and what they would correlate with being able to predict potential issues and intervene, a big one being postpartum depression, which is really quite common and not enough work has been done on obviously. But there's a study that just came out that reinforces the importance of early intervention. There's a research group in Japan, and they looked at how altered bonding between infants and mothers who had postpartum depression could actually impact the behavior and development of them as kids, as children up to 12 years old. Or sixth grade is actually what they looked at. I do want to say though, of course, I think they did a pretty good job at trying to look at confounding variables, but there are so many things that shape early child development, and so I'm not bringing this up to put additional pressure on moms. This is a systemic issue that needs to be taken more seriously. And I think that these kinds of studies remind you that it needs to be taken more seriously so people can get help right away. I just want to preface this.
Deboki: I think another thing also that might be important to note is that postpartum depression is not just limited to the first few weeks or months of pregnancy. I know people who don't realize or they might not even have symptoms of postpartum depression until much later. And I think it's easy to dismiss that because you're like, "Well, I'm out of the newborn phase. I'm not immediately postpartum. This can't be postpartum depression." But actually, I forget what the cutoff is, I think it might be a year is usually when the symptoms can appear.
Sam: Interesting. Yeah, good to keep in mind. But I guess this study included 245 mother-child pairs in Japan with children born between April 2nd, 2009 and April 1st, 2012. And so this is a very long study. That's the beginning of it. And they used these established assessments for measuring both maternal depressive symptoms indicative of postpartum depression and bonding. And what they found was that about 17% of the mothers exhibited postpartum depressive symptoms, which I guess is pretty much in alignment with what you'd expect, at least in Japan it was in line. I don't actually know what the exact percentage is here in the US.
Then many years pass, of course, and these pairs are reevaluated. They found that postpartum depression and mother to infant bonding predict child psychosocial difficulties in sixth grade. They looked at them when they were in sixth grade, things like hyperactivity and difficulty paying attention. But what they also found was that bonding, if there was still a significant amount of bonding, that actually mediates almost 35% of the effect of postpartum maternal depression on these difficulties that these kids are experiencing in sixth grade, which the researchers take to mean that early bonding will help buffer the long-term effects of postpartum depression. It's not this either-or. It's not like either you bond or you have postpartum depression, there's a lot of bonding that can go on. It makes it harder, but that bonding is very important. This is really just complex. And I just took it as a reminder of the importance of having resources for new moms and taking postpartum depression seriously so that everyone is set up for success. One of my doctors is amazing, who very early on in my pregnancy said, "Look, no one should have to suffer. I don't want any of my patients experiencing postpartum depression, and I'm keeping a close eye on you." And just having that, you know?
Deboki: Yeah.
Sam: Having someone acknowledge that this is very real and that, yes, even sometimes with intervention, it's going to be something someone experiences, but a lot of times if there is early intervention, it can just head a lot of stuff off at the past and just-
Deboki: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, because postpartum depression is not a failing.
Sam: No.
Deboki: And I don't think you're presenting the results in this way, but I think from what I remember of being in that postpartum haze where it feels like anything that I'm doing that feels not quite fully... The mom that I want to be felt like this long-term failure or I'm potentially setting off this long-term failure for my kid. That's I think sometimes what makes these studies hard to take in because you're like, "What if this means that if I have postpartum depression, am I ruining my kid's life in the future?" That's not what it is, right?
Sam: No.
Deboki: It's like these things are the reality, because pregnancy is such a toll on your body and your brain. It is a huge commitment. And so it's really, I think, more about giving people the resources to figure out is there something they need help for? What that help looks like and just having that knowledge, because I think it is so hard. I was really glad to be able to talk to my therapist through that transition into motherhood because it was just every week, especially in the beginning, things were just constantly changing, both because my baby is changing, but also my body and my brain are recovering from what I've just been doing. And it's such a weird ride. And I didn't have postpartum depression, but it was still wild to realize how hard things can feel at times without it being considered postpartum depression, if that makes sense. And I say that with all the love and affection for that period as well, too. It's very hard. And also, yeah, I don't know, it's cliche, but it's transformative. Yeah, I think it's really good to be able to highlight this kind of research.
Sam: Right, yeah, and just talk about it. I think it's just important to remind people that this is real. It affects a lot of people. It's not your fault, and you deserve to get care.
Deboki: For your sake, for your family's sake, all of those things, everyone deserves that. Thanks for tuning in to this week’s episode of Tiny Matters, a podcast produced by Multitude and brought to you by the American Chemical Society, a non-profit scientific organization based in Washington, DC. This week’s script was written by Sam, who is also our executive producer, and edited by me and by Michael David. It was fact-checked by Michelle Boucher. Our audio editor was Mischa Stanton.
Sam: Thanks so much to Karen Mestan and Emily Jacobs for joining us. Go rate and review us wherever you listen, we super duper appreciate it. We’ll see you next time.
References:
- A Brief History of the Sonogram
- Blood Safety and Matching
- Causes of newborn jaundice
- Bili lights
- Kernicterus
- Around 40 percent of preterm infants with BPD-PH die before the age of 2. UAB studies establish two significant risk factors of the condition
- Health Care Burden of Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia Among Extremely Preterm Infants
- Cord Blood Biomarkers of Placental Maternal Vascular Underperfusion Predict Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia-Associated Pulmonary Hypertension
- Pregnancy leads to long-lasting changes in human brain structure
- Neuroanatomical changes observed over the course of a human pregnancy
- Lack of neuron ‘pruning’ may be behind many brain-related conditions
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