Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body

Looking for Patterns in your Menstrual Cycle as Keys to Overall Health: Conversation with Dr. Gombert-Labedens, Part II

We are at the cusp of understanding more about the complicated conversation going on between your brain, ovaries, and pituitary. Your menstrual cycle contains within it information about your overall health, and the work we'll talk about today gets us one step closer to deciphering important elements of this conversation.  In particular, by organizing data according to the rhythm of menstrual cycles, we are looking not only at a level change, for example, is temperature going up or down in different parts of the cycle, but at the daily context in which temperature changes, which allows us to look for patterns in this change over time. In the future, we may be able to use these patterns to diagnose not only issues with reproductive health (ie, PMDD, endometriosis, etc.), but with health overall. Identifying Menstrual Metrics as Personal Health Markers: Age Trends and Individual Footprints in Temperature across 5674 cycles: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeb1175 [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeb1175] Nanotechnology looking at measuring hormones: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-023-01513-0 [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-023-01513-0]

What Can we learn about overall health by examining features of the menstrual cycle?: Conversation with Dr. Gombert-Labedens, Part I

Your menstrual cycle is the engine of reproduction and a window into your overall health.  It's critical both for a successful pregnancy, and can tell us things about your endocrine, metabolic, immune, and cardiac systems.  We have tended to look at things like how heavy or light the flow of your period is, or the length of the cycle as signs of wellness or distress in your system. But some researchers, like the one I speak with today, are trying to mine different aspects of the cycle for information about overall health.  What Dr. Gombert-Labedens  and her colleagues are looking at is menstrual cycle linked temperature patterns, which change systemically with age and are surprisingly consistent within each person, so that they may be useful to track aging and detect deviations from a person's usual physiological state. We'll talk today about the state of this research and where it may be going Using activity trackers in pregnancy, conversation with Dr. Benjamin Smarr (part I): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/can-an-activity-tracker-tell-you-if-you-are-pregnant/id1779600854?i=1000719761885 [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/can-an-activity-tracker-tell-you-if-you-are-pregnant/id1779600854?i=1000719761885] Science Advances paper: Identifying Menstrual Metrics as Personal Health Markers: Age Trends and individual footprints in temperature across 5675 cycles: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeb1175 [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeb1175]

What can an organoid teach us about the human menstrual cycle: Conversation with Dr. Margherita Turco, Part II

This is a glimpse of our future through the lens of the menstrual cycle. Women, on average, experience about 400 cycles in their lives, and the process is integrally connected to many other features of your overall health and, of course, is critically important to a successful pregnancy. Using 3-D human organoids, Dr. Turco and her team test different facets of the cells of the uterine lining to learn more about what in the world is going on in your uterus during your cycle.   In most studies of the human body, there's one particular market served by the research, but this one's a doozy. If you are a human with a uterus, this work is for you, and if you are planning to be born from a human with a uterus, this work is also for you.

Inside the Black Box of your Menstrual Cycle: Conversation with Dr. Margherita Turco, Part I

For all recorded time, the human menstrual cycle has been kind of a mystery. Is your period too long? Is your period too short? Are you bleeding too much? Is there too much pain?  It's hard to answer these questions because I'm not sure it makes sense to compare yourself to some, quote, "average woman," because the menstrual cycle is so integrally involved in so many different systems in your body. It makes more sense to look at how your cycle is changing over time, but we don't even have very much data about that.  Can we experiment with mice? Sure. But our system is different from the system of a mouse.  Can we look at samples of the uterine linings of different women over time? Sure. But that approach tells a story that's not the same as whatever is going on in one person's uterus over time.  Today's guest is ushering in a new era of uterine lining exploration that will allow for a much more dynamic, human-centered examination of this amazing tissue that's critical for both a successful pregnancy and integral to women's health. She is opening up the black box of the human menstrual cycle.  AN IN VITRO MENSTRUAL CYCLE USING ORGANOIDS CAPTURES EPITHELIAL CELL TRANSITIONS DURING MENSTRUATION AND REGENERATION OF THE HUMAN ENDOMETRIUM: HTTPS://WWW.CELL.COM/CELL-STEM-CELL/FULLTEXT/S1934-5909(26)00145-1?_RETURNURL=HTTPS%3A%2F%2FLINKINGHUB.ELSEVIER.COM%2FRETRIEVE%2FPII%2FS1934590926001451%3FSHOWALL%3DTRUE [https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(26)00145-1?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS1934590926001451%3Fshowall%3Dtrue]

Understanding Your Menstrual Cycle: Why It Matters, How It Works, and Why You Should Care

Your menstrual cycle is incredibly important for your overall health and for your best chance at a successful pregnancy.  Creating a high-tech uterine lining each month that you will either continue to develop through a pregnancy or you'll eliminate if pregnancy isn't on the menu, is a biologically intensive and complex process. And there are a select few among all placental mammals who run this process the way humans do. Scientists estimate that less than 2% of placental mammals menstruate the way we do. Something like 84 species out of more than 5,000. All the primate species are relatively closely related, and we menstruate in a similar way, but there's also unexpected attendance at this intimate gathering of placental mammals that menstruate like us, including the spiny mouse, some species of bat, and the elephant shrew.  This week's topic is focused on why we essentially organize so many bodily functions around the way that we have a menstrual cycle, how on God's green earth we do it, and what information we can glean from keeping track of cycle to cycle variation.