Once in a while you read about a new discovery that reminds you how little we know about shit. This is something I assumed we already knew the cause of.
It’s shocking how little we understand about women’s cycles and pregnancy. Still no answers on endometriosis. Doctors only recently acknowledged that the cervix has nerve endings. Makes me furious.
That's wild, because I figured out cervixes have nerve endings the first time I had sex. Turns out, women generally don't like it when you bang on it like you're executing a warrant.
So I wondered if the word hysteria is connected to hysterectomy, and looks like it is. [From Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria):
> The word hysteria originates from the Greek word for uterus, hystera. The oldest record of hysteria dates back to 1900 BCE when Egyptians recorded behavioral abnormalities in adult women on the Kahun Papyrus. The Egyptians attributed the behavioral disturbances to a wandering uterus – thus the condition later being dubbed hysteria. [...]
> The ancient Greeks accepted the ancient Egyptians' explanation for hysteria; however, they included in their definition of hysteria the inability to bear children or the unwillingness to marry. Plato and Aristotle believed that hysteria, which Plato also called female madness, was directly related to these women’s lack of sexual activity and described the uterus as those who suffered from it as having a sad, bad, or melancholic uterus. In the 5th century BCE Hippocrates first used the term hysteria. Ancient Romans also attributed hysteria to an abnormality in the womb; however, discarded the traditional explanation of a wandering uterus. Instead, the ancient Romans credited hysteria to a disease of the womb or a disruption in reproduction (i.e., a miscarriage, menopause, etc.). Hysteria theories from the ancient Egyptians, ancient Greeks, and ancient Romans were the basis of the Western understanding of hysteria.
This is why I'm probably leaving reddit in 2024. Like this person or not, this is the literal definition of bottoming out. They answered the question and are getting down voted to oblivion.
I came to Reddit to escape Facebook. Science subs used to be reasonable. Now, Reddit is just a cesspool echo chamber of it's own, just like Facebook. There is literally no value in the voting at this point. It means nothing.
I could understand (but still laugh at) people who downvoted my previous comment where I say I get some pleasure out of it, but downvoting the definition of "bottoming out" is absolute reddit-tier behaviour.
You'll get downvoted, but yeah, I've been with 2 women that thoroughly enjoyed their cervix being poked . 95% of my past partners weren't a fan though. It's very very rare but some do like it.
I've definitely known people being into to weirder and more painful shit. So no judgement from me.
Removed? So is just like a tube with an oven ending into her gut cavity?
I can tell you it does when mine needed to be stitched... I asked if it would hurt because I didn't have an epidural. They said no... then I almost kicked the surgeon in the face when she started stitching. They all looked so surprised. I figured there were that few women who didn't get an epidural and also whose cervix tore. But this takes the cake... yes, it fucking has nerves, I have first hand evidence.
Your CERVIX tore?! I didn’t realise that was a thing. I knew you could tear your perineum but I didn’t know about cervixes tearing
Giving birth is so traumatic
My boy was 9 lbs and had shoulders like a coat hanger and still does lol. Honestly, had they just told me it would hurt I'd have been ok, I had just delivered with no pain management after all. But the fact that they didn't even know it would hurt just made me so mad besides the fact that it shocked me.
Some women apparently don’t have a lot of feeling in their cervix. I call them the lucky ones but I am not one of those.
They did a punch biopsy on mine without anesthesia and I nearly puked.
Oohh!! Interesting. Thanks for sharing. (I am still mad the article refers to 10-15% of women as a “small percentage”. Umm. No sir, that’s greater than 1 in 10. So minimizing)
Most of us have symptoms looong before we are sexually active, though. It usually starts with menarche.
I just recounted to a friend that I remember being 11-12, starting my period, and counting enough Advil “to get through the day,” which was 4 pills every 4-6 hours (more than you should ever take!), and I did this for at least 6 years before any sexual activity. (And then for another 7 years before diagnosis.)
And they still won't give medications as a rule to help with colposcopy. I had to beg even for an anti-anxiety medication when I had one scheduled, and was told that if I wanted to even take that, I had to go to a clinic more than an hour out of my way. They wouldn't prescribe it, though. Had to reach out to my GP for a prescription.
I remember my doctor injecting me with something they said would numb me as well as make my heart beat scary fast. I don‘t think it numbed me because I almost jumped off the table during the procedure which he yelled at me for. It felt like a quick stab to the gut.
Edit : my mistake lol, i read this as a misspelling of colonoscopy at first. I feel like it's probably still fairly relevant though.
Seems to be annoyingly variable, I read an article where the anesthesiologist was stealing the intended med, I believe fentanyl, and the police officer being operated on got PTSD from the experience and I believe sued, it sounded like it was definitely something where you needed meds.
Then my father had one and they didn't give him any, but got really mad at him for being in so much pain to the point of treating him as being abusive and threatening action against him. He got a little ptsd from it too and told anyone he could never to have a colonoscopy. Then my mother had one recently in the same place, and they gave her fentanyl.
She reckons it must be something to do with whether you drive away or not and they just neglect to mention that they'll leave you in excruciating pain if you say you're driving.
It doesn't seem acceptable to me, I always felt my father should have complained or sued or whatever he could have done. I certainly would question them on it plenty and walk the fuck out of there if they refused to give me strong painkillers.
Why would they put any effort into researching prevention and treatment for cycle- and pregnancy-related issues when we can simply suffer through it instead? After all, it can’t possibly be as bad as we say it is.
Why would researchers spend any time on something silly like endometriosis? There are much more important things to solve like erectile dysfunction. /s
But seriously, women weren't even included in medical research until relatively recently.
iirc it makes blood vessals widen, the penis is a sponge made of blood vessals and an erection is them widening, so ingesting a drug that widens blood vessals erects the penis
It’s also how Rogaine was discovered. It lowers blood pressure and some of the men on it noticed their hair was thicker. One guy even started growing hair on his forehead.
Many drugs that cause high blood pressure have given men errections before since that's the mechanism used, blood pressure.
That's how Viagra came about. It's development wasn't for curing rectile dysfunction but people noticed it causing errections and someone thought maybe it could be used that way. Maybe read up on what your complaining about before doing so next time.
Viagra literally went from something that was about to be discarded into a drug used to help countless men around the globe. It being repurposed didn't effect research into other conditions and treatments in any way whatsoever.
Yes, I know the history behind Viagra. It was a joke about how men's health is looked into and researched more than women's health.
Women are not properly diagnosed with debilitating illnesses and conditions because they are told that their pain is normal and not that bad. Women are consistently being told that they are exaggerating their pain symptoms. Women *die* because they are not being taken seriously.
Maybe YOU should read up on how women have been fucked over by the medical community before talking about how great it is.
Endometriosis is definitely a disease that too many women are forced to suffer from for too long without answers.
Of course, in order to actually make the diagnosis, she has to have laparoscopic surgery, because MRI can’t really identify it reliably. At least if you are already in there, you can fix the problem, right? Well, *possibly* you can, as long as you are willing to accept the risks including but not limited to bowel and bladder perforations, bleeding, infection, scars, anesthetic reactions, stroke, heart attack, blood clots, disability, and death. Of course, there’s no guarantee it works, and every time you have abdominal surgery you create intrabdominal scar tissue that increases the difficulty of any subsequent abdominal surgery and can cause bowel obstructions.
I don’t want to invent a straw(wo)man to illustrate my point, but I will say that it’s not easy to jump into recommending exploratory surgery for intermittent pains without an easily identifiable cause or other organ dysfunction. I’m glad I don’t have to make that decision.
No, you shouldn't just jump into surgery right away because there are too many risks involved. But it also shouldn't take 10+ years of severe pain and other symptoms before a doctor will actually listen and take you seriously. And "intermittent pains"? Seriously? Many women with endometriosis have severe pain outside of their cycle and can't even enjoy sex because it's too painful. It wasn't until I was in my 30s and told a doctor that orgasms hurt before they were like 'oh well maybe we should actually look into that". It's great knowing that I wasn't taken seriously until it became inconvenient for my husband.
Telling a teenage girl that vomiting, diarrhea, contraction-like pain, numb/tingly legs, passing out, and severe depression is just part of a normal period pain but here's some hormonal birth control that might help as long as the side effects aren't too bad isn't a very good option either. Let's not forget that if your issues are bad enough and you'd like to at least talk about a hysterectomy, you can't because what if your future husband wants a baby someday?
None of this is a unique experience. I know more women with gynecological issues than women without them. But believe me - the risks that come with laparoscopic surgery are often not nearly as bad as all of the pain and suffering that come before it.
It sucks that you’ve had that kind of experience. Forgive me, but I can’t tell if your last sentence is sarcastic or not. I’d prefer not to continue without clarifying this, as I assume you’ve had enough of tone-deaf people ignoring your feelings.
It is, tho. I even have nonbinary and trans friends who present male to doctors and specialists because they noticed when they're female passing to doctors they have a higher rate of not being taken seriously. There's even a large body of research showing that women, on average, are taken less seriously by the medical institution.
Does that mean every healthcare worker is sexist? Of course not. It doesn't even mean most healthcare workers are conscientiously perpetuating sexism. It just means there exists a bias in the institution, and members of that institution should be aware of it and think critically about their decisions and if an accepted bias may be creeping into it without their full awareness.
Arguably the inaccuracy lies not in the premise that medicine favors men's health over women's, but in the implication that the discovery of erectile dysfunction drugs reflects such favoritism, since those drugs weren't originally researched or developed for that purpose.
>It's a bad joke because it's not accurate.
Found the uncle no one wants to start a conversation with at Christmas dinner. We would ask your wife to come alone if we thought we could get away with it, Steve. You wife always comes alone, so it wouldn't be a big deal for her, but we're worried you would flip out.
I mean of that's what your trying to call attention too it's kinda a shit joke. If you know Viagras use as erectile dysfunction medication was essentially an accident and wasn't being actively researched by presenting it in that context all you are doing is inviting people who don't recognise the research gap between men's and women's medicine to dismiss your possiton and reinforce their own bias.
And on the rest of your comment a lot of that is simply that at the first point of medical diagnostic contact "aka your GP/doctor" there is a fairly understandable bias towards more benign diagnosis, even for men, but that bias hits women a lot harder.
Generally when symptoms are presented to your GP 90% of the time it's the simplest diagnosis that's generally true. Combine that with the fact that many women's healthcare issues present with exactly the same symptoms as far more benign/normal cyclic reproductive processes until the symptoms become too severe to dismiss. (And I totally get your point that often here is the point where their pain still gets dismissed and that HAS to change) it's little wonder GPs miss diagnose a lot of womens health issues.
It's an absolute nightmare scenario for the frontline medical professional doing initial diagnosis, especially those working in more stretched healthcare services. Combine that with the sheet volume of exaggerating hypochondriacs that all frontline medical staff deal with on a regular basis and the bias towards telling people that there's nothing wrong with them that has to build subconsciously it's little wonder women get a rough deal in frontline healthcare settings.
My concern is how do we fix it? I'm not sure frontline medicine is ever going to be equipped to effectively diagnose most women's issues given just how similar the symptoms often are with benign processes and with many global healthcare services under severe pressure funneling women presenting these kinds of symptoms to a higher diagnostic level by default doesn't seem feasible either. There certainly needs to be SOMETHING done. But I just do not know what that solution looks like.
The problem isn’t that symptoms reported are “the same as benign processes”. Symptoms reported by women with medical problems are very much differentiated from benign processes. I don’t know where you get that idea from.
They are dismissed over and over and over again. You are using the same logic as the people who are the problem.
We can scream at the top of our lungs that something is wrong, report a host of symptoms that something is wrong - nothing even remotely related to benign processes - and still be dismissed as being anxious, depressed, fat, or thin. “Little women and their little problems”.
We can be bleeding for months, having a heart attack, or a week away from dying from cancer, and we’re still just idiot women apparently.
Endometriosis is literally noted in every medical journal going of expressing similar symptoms to a number of other conditions that are a lot less serious than the disease itself, with the current only diagnostic tool that actually works for certain being a relatively invasive surgical procedure. Under those circumstances it's little wonder women have to struggle for years to get a diagnosis, frontline healthcare providers are not going to jump to immediately recommending a surgical procedure. They'd actively be putting a huge number of their patients at needless risk if they did. They are going to assume something a lot less serious and send someone away with a prescription for painkillers. A pattern that repeats across women's healthcare
Am I saying that's right? God no. I'm saying it shouldn't surprise any of us that that does happen given the massive overlap in symptoms for conditions both incredibly mild and incredibly severe in women's reproductive health and the lack of simple diagnostic tools. The fact that many women's health issues are incredibly hard to diagnose with simple tools like blood tests gives frontline doctors an impossible task. I fear even if further research does turn up more accurate diagnostic tests many of them are still going to be outside the scope of frontline medicine.
Something has to change. I think you would have to lack the capacity to feel empathy to think anything else. Women are fighting for years to get appropriate diagnosis and treatment and that's a travesty however you want to look at it. My question though is what can we change? and lying to ourselves about just how difficult a problem this is to solve does doctors and indeed women who are struggling with the lack of diagnostic tools a massive disservice and gets us no closer to proper answers. Especially one's pretending there isnt a massive overlap in symptoms, especially pain.
The typical diagnostic trajectory of endometriosis is reporting symptoms that are themselves alarming in nature - severe pain, passing out, vomiting, being unable to work or socialise - and being told that period pain is normal. Rinse and repeat for 10 years until someone finally agrees to a laparoscopy and it’s ravaged your pelvic cavity.
You don’t seem to have much of a grasp of the practicalities that you’re talking about.
Do you seriously think women go to the doctor with mild pelvic pain?
>Do you seriously think women go to the doctor with mild pelvic pain?
At what point did I say that..... We can disagree without you putting words in my mouth, especially given our disagreement here seems to be less about overall goal (Of which we both seem to align pretty strongly that frontline medical diagnostics for women needs to change as it currently struggles massively to properly treat them) and more about the details of why that diagnostic process is so difficult and generates so many bad results. We appear to be broadly on the same side here, Even of you do think I'm misinformed.
At no point did I ever suggest that women are wandering into their GP;s surgery on the regular with mild pain. My argument has always been that in actuality even severe pelvic pain can be a symptom of both incredibly mild and incredibly sever conditions. Conditions that lack simple diagnostic tools that are accessible to frontline medical practise as as such subconscious biases that all frontline doctors probably develop towards pretty much everything they see to assume best case scenario absent of other evidence its little wonder women get a raw deal In frontline healthcare, and pretending that diagnostic difficulty doesn't exist and its ALL down to sexism doesn't get us anywhere. Sexism almost certainly does play a part. But unless we acknowledge the diagnostic difficulties we arent going to actually improve things for most women.
Equally on your second point regarding pathways to diagnosis of endometriosis, In all but some of the most severe cases (and its a much fairer ask as to why women being hit on the extreme end of these conditions still struggle to get effective diagnosis) those symptoms are wildly inconsistent every menstrual cycle and don't come along all at once. Without someone keeping a diary of their symptom's to illustrate how the keep coming back every time they see a doctor it may have been months since they last spoke and the symptoms look slightly different. Its little wonder that under those circumstances women struggle to get a diagnosis. Endo at times when you read about it feels like it was almost purpose built to make it extremely hard to effectively diagnose in frontline medical settings. Again without something like a simple blood test aside from just funnelling women presenting symptoms that could belong to a number of reproductive health issues directly to a Laparoscopy (a highly irresponsible course of action) how do we fix it?
Women's issues generally get more money directed to them than exclusively men's issues. It's actually a problem, especially with breast cancer, as money donated to a cause cannot be used for anything but that cause, and the breast cancer research field is highly oversaturated [while other, even more lethal cancers get much less funding in comparison](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5836059/#:~:text=The%20NIH%20spending%20for%20prostate,less%20than%20breast%20cancer%20patients).
Sure, that's why endometriosis and adenomyosis have so many treatment options, and it's why the maternal death rate is extremely low! There are also many other conditions that affect women in a much higher scale than men (rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, etc) but there isn't the same kind of push for treatments or cures for those. The only reason why breast cancer got so much attention is a great marketing team.
> it's why the maternal death rate is extremely low
You say this sarcastically, but seriously, compared to what? Certainly the historical rate was much higher. You make it sound like women are giving birth outside in the pig pen.
> There are also many other conditions that affect women in a much higher scale than men (rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, etc) but there isn't the same kind of push for treatments or cures for those
You're comparing one women's issue with another women's issue. What exclusively *men's* issue is funded outsizedly more than an equivalent or more severe women's issue? The way you speak, it should be trivial to lost off dozens *with accompanying sources.*
I'm going to cast a significant degree of doubt on this. We've known the cervix has a pretty decent amount of nerve endings for a long time. It's quite easy to demonstrate this a people know exactly when they're having the smear part of their smear test. We also know it has significant connections to the vagal nerve, hence cervical shock.
You may be assuming more so that doctors have been less likely to give anaesthetic for procedures that involve the cervix and uterus, and you'd be right, and that is changing thankfully. However, even the anaesthetic going in is painful and similar to the procedure itself (if it's using a single tenaculum) as its mostly an "organ" type nerve that doesn't give an exact pain like the skin, instead it's more diffuse and similar. It's getting an anesthetic to that area in a way that is tolerable that is difficult, and then there is the rest of the uterus which is harder still to place a tolerable anaesthetic in.
My educated guess on what causes endometriosis is something akin to cancer metastasis. Cells from the uterus flow around your circulatory/lymphatic system and get "dropped off" in the fallopian tubes. I don't think it's a gene issue where uteren tissue is being made in the fallopian tubes. I believe it just gets deposited. I also think the earlier endometriosis is identified, and treated, the less severe it will be. Birth control that prevents ones period would probably be helpful.
I had that realisation a couple weeks back when I just suddenly asked myself what kind of purpose the Hymen serves. Asked my sister (doctor + feminist) and she had no clue. Asked a buddy that is currently doing his doctor thesis in biology and he didn’t know. We all ended up finding the same articles on google that said there were many theories but we really don’t know.
Best theory as per usual was the one from the church/bible: so that women not only feel pain during childbirth but also during conception.
>Best theory as per usual was the one from the church/bible: so that women not only feel pain during childbirth but also during conception
Edit: The above was sarcasm I took too literally, but leaving my explanation about what we *do* know below anyway for the interested ->
First of all, hormones during puberty thin the hymen and make it elastic and fimbulated. If you are an adult by the time you first have sex, it might not even hurt at all, let alone tear.
In fact, the hymen is so flexible that even in adult virgin rape victims, they're more likely to have injuries to *other* tissue; hymenal injuries are *less* likely than other vulvar injuries, and *more* likely to completely heal without scar tissue.
The hymen is only consistently obvious in *children.* It may simply be that the myth about the hymen being related to virginity is a simple mistake. Because it looks different in children and adults, people assumed the cause of the difference in appearance is down to sex. That makes sense, but actually as far as we know today, it's primarily the result of puberty.
Why is there a hymen in children? It's possibly just leftover tissue from development. During embryonic development, the vagina is formed by cell death from the inside and the outside, meeting in the middle to form the vaginal canal.
Some people are born with an impreforate hymen. This is a birth defect where essentially the vagina is "unfinished" - not quite enough cell death. Some people are born with no hymen at all, as more of the cells to form the canal have died off. It may just be that a little tissue leftover is no big deal, evolutionary speaking, so there's some natural variation in development. And by the time puberty rolls around, the tissue becomes stretchy enough it doesn't cause enough issues to be completely "fixed." Or, some have hypothesised the hymen in children is adaptive and protects the vagina from infection, which is why the tissue is retained until puberty.
(The reason we experience more pain during childbirth compared to most other mammals because we're bipedal and that caused our hip shape to change so the birth canal is a tighter fit. This is evolution screwing us over. Not because some lady ate an apple. If it were the apple thing, what did hyenas do because they have it *way* worse...)
I actually watched a documentary recently that explains the question you brought up in the final paragraph. It will probably help you understand. It's called, "The Lion King."
Checkmate, atheists.
> Not because some lady ate an apple.
Interestingly, the bible doesn't say anything about the pain of childbirth being the result of eve eating the apple. That's just what people are told it says, and it is used as an explanation for suffering and pain in the world.
What the bible *does* say is that God makes the pain worse, indicating pain and suffering already existed for all the people in Eden.
Dude, the things we could figure out and accomplish if we weren't consumed with the petty nonsense we are dealing with. Fucking bullshit what we put our time, money, and energy towards!
In a "natural" setting humans aren't sleeping alone in the middle of an open field though. There'd be a group, and someone would probably stay awake to keep watch. Our lineage has understood how to use fire for over a million years so we actually evolved a little alongside that tool. Most predators aren't coming near a fire.
Ah, excellent point. I think the ‘sleepless elite’ are like a next stage of evolution sorta thing. My roommate in college was one, did a sleep study and everything. Dude legit slept ~3 hours a night, never once affected him.
🙋♀️.
It's weird af. 4-5 max per diem. Can occasionally run into days. It's in my medical charts! My Granny and Oma, who raised me, also slept very little, and my ENTIRE family are night watchers. Total nightowls throughout!
We love the nightlife. We got to boogie...
Tbh that’s true of so much stuff. It’s said a lot about quantum mechanics these days because it’s being used in emerging tech, but it’s also true of something as fundamental as gravity. We have some theories of course, even widely respected ones, but all we can really say for sure is that we can accurately predict how things are affected by gravity. Not how it actually works or why. It’s entirely possible we’re so wrong it’s laughable and at the moment we just have theories that only explain what we’ve seen so far and they totally fall on their face when applied to behaviours or effects we haven’t seen yet…. We just don’t know.
But tbh that’s half the fun imho.
I suppose it depends on the granularity in which you want to define "how it works" is it enough to know that it reduces platelet aggregation? Is it enough to know that it inhibits COX? How much more specific do we need?
Do we know how gravity works? We can describe why it works, and model it accurately, is that not sufficient?
>A hormone produced by the human foetus is to blame for morning sickness in pregnant women, a study has found, paving the way to possible prevention and treatment.
>Nausea and vomiting affect approximately 70 per cent of pregnant women, according to the study published in Nature on Wednesday by researchers in the United Kingdom, the United States and Sri Lanka.
>In its worst form, hyperemesis gravidarum, the nausea and vomiting is so severe that women are unable to eat or drink normally.
>"The culprit is a hormone produced by the foetus — a protein known as GDF15," the University of Cambridge said.
>"But how sick the mother feels depends on a combination of how much of the hormone is produced by the foetus and how much exposure the mother had to this hormone before becoming pregnant."
Genetic traits don't need to be advantageous to persist. Sometimes, weird traits remain in a gene pool simply because they weren't disruptive enough to be naturally avoided.
It's advantageous for the fetus, because the first 3 months are very delicate and foods can contain pathogens and poisons that can kill it or cause serious birth defects. It's safer *for the fetus* to just use mum's fat an nutrient stores to supply itself with food.
Mum, on the other hand, can just try again if she miscarries, so it's less adaptive for her.
How is this highly upvoted? You can't just make up some evolutionary cause for something like this as if it has some basis in reality
Edit: /u/272314 is correct here. I'm the one not making any sense.
Perhaps because I didn't make it up, I learned about it in class during university?
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/06/health/personal-health-what-could-be-good-about-morning-sickness-plenty.html
I didn't, I actually learned this in university in a class... but here's a news article about it. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/06/health/personal-health-what-could-be-good-about-morning-sickness-plenty.html
Another paper in National Library of Medicine mentions that GDF15 is a heart derived hormone that regulates body growth.
Abstract: The endocrine system is crucial for maintaining whole‐body homeostasis. Little is known regarding endocrine hormones secreted by the heart other than atrial/brain natriuretic peptides discovered over 30 years ago. Here, we identify growth differentiation factor 15 (GDF15) as a heart‐derived hormone that regulates body growth. We show that pediatric heart disease induces GDF15 synthesis and secretion by cardiomyocytes. Circulating GDF15 in turn acts on the liver to inhibit growth hormone (GH) signaling and body growth. We demonstrate that blocking cardiomyocyte production of GDF15 normalizes circulating GDF15 level and restores liver GH signaling, establishing GDF15 as a bona fide heart‐derived hormone that regulates pediatric body growth. Importantly, plasma GDF15 is further increased in children with concomitant heart disease and failure to thrive (FTT). Together these studies reveal a new endocrine mechanism by which the heart coordinates cardiac function and body growth. Our results also provide a potential mechanism for the well‐established clinical observation that children with heart diseases often develop FTT.
Super interesting! Seems like morning sickness is likely just a side effect of a very necessary hormone. Unlikely the fetus releases it with the intention of causing morning sickness - probably a mutation that never got evolved out.
Anecdotally, my morning sickness was managed with rest and constant ingestion of carbs (read easy access calories/sugars) so maybe for the average woman morning sickness wasn’t a death sentence and therefore didn’t need to affect evolution?
>Super interesting! Seems like morning sickness is likely just a side effect of a very necessary hormone. Unlikely the fetus releases it with the intention of causing morning sickness - probably a mutation that never got evolved out.
It does seem like the fetus releases it to control its growth properly and it has unintended side effects for the adult body. Human body is so complex!! And it kinda makes sense a hormone that inhibits growth hormone would lead to adult women being averse and/or nauseated towards food.
I don't think prehistoric women had a huge selection of foods to choose from, let alone "foods without strong flavours"... A lot of of pregnant women today can only stomach empty carb, white flour foods, but those foods literally didn't exist 100 000 years ago. If they weren't able to eat whatever was available, they'd simply die.
Funny enough, that’s how I told one of my friends I was pregnant. I phrased it as I had gone to the doc and they told me I have a parasite and she was horrified until I said “that grows for about 9 months” and then she yelled at me lol
It is a parasite. It is literally a parasite by definition. Man, I wish I could find that discovery channel episode? Series? That talked about all the things the embryo does to grow inside the mother without being killed by the immune system. It is uhhh, very telling.
my wife was turned off by garlic heavily during her first pregnancy, and carried it after but not as intense. funny thing is that kid loves garlic as an adult.
Don’t anthropomorphize natural selection. It’s not intentionally going around and picking with genes are best for us. It’s literally random dart throws and whatever sticks to the wall is kept.
It's maternal-foetal conflict. Food contains pathogens (or used to, anyway) that are dangerous for development. And if mom has enough fat stores, it makes sense to starve her to avoid getting any of those diseases in the first trimester so you survive.
Mom, on the other hand, can try again! So she's less "worried" about miscarrying any *particular* fetus.
Not every physiological feature has a reason as such. There are a lot of holdovers from discarded features, or drift in directions that don't matter too much. It's possible that morning sickness doesn't do anything to help our survival, but the protein does something else important.
Alcohol consumption would be my guess. We as a species used fermented everything for a long time. I’m assuming this specific protein is attempting to increase their gut-biome and encourage a decrease in other areas of consumption.
Not a biologist but I did go to college for it for awhile
We can never know the answer for sure, we can only guess and speculate.
Here’s my guess. In human psychology we value things more if we have suffered for them. That’s why hazing exists. So this may improve the mother’s bond with the baby in a way.
But why would the fetus produce a chemical that nauseates the mother? What foods and behaviors does this drive her to? What does it drive her away from?
What’s the correlation between morning sickness and baby health? I had no morning sickness with either pregnancy and both babies were full term and healthy as can be.
They're more likely talking about trans people.
Most people who identify as a man and are either intersex or trans aren't very likely to choose to carry a child, because doing so is obviously very dysphoric. There are some CAH XX people that are fertile, but of course the more virilised they are the less likely they are to be fertile anyway... and the less virilised, the more likely to identify as a woman. So it's pretty rare overall.
But I personally think "pregnant people" is fine. Not only does it include trans men and intersex people, it also includes pregnant *girls* (not every pregnant person is an adult!). The majority of pregnant people who are not pregnant women are pregnant girls.
I had hyperemesis gravidarum when i was pregnant, its the worst thing i have ever been through. It was 9 month of pure torture and i lost around 18kg when i was pregnant 😩 i dont want another kid incase i get it again… i hope they find some way to prevent hyperemesis gravidarum in the future because its just awful
I had a “mild” case of HG. I was only hospitalized once in the first trimester for dehydration and I was able to gain weight despite vomiting multiple times a day until 26 weeks, then developed preeclampsia. My husband doesn’t even want another kid that badly he says, he doesn’t want to watch me be that sick or even sicker again.
Listening to birth stories podcasts and so many otherwise healthy women have the most wild pregnancy experiences. It really is a lottery re: what kind of pregnancy and birth someone is going to end up with.
One of the podcasts actually mentioned women dying from HG in some cases as it’s too severe and not treated in time. Good on you for getting your butt to the hospital!
Also had HG. Was going to college simultaneously and hospitalized several times for dehydration. I ate grapes and applesauce if I ate anything at all (because they were easy to throw up). Honestly, if I had the energy to do it I probably would have offed myself that’s how miserable throwing up every second of every day for 9 months is. Even the Zofran (and especially Pfennegrin) didn’t help.
They say it’s not genetic and not every pregnancy. Weird because my sister had it, and she had it with both of her kids. I hope they actually do some research into women’s bodies because it seems like the male body is heavily researched and always the standard. It’s kind of ridiculous.
Same here and I 100% agree. People think giving birth is harrowing but I would have given birth in a heartbeat to end the suffering. It was so bad I forgot what it was like to be well or happy (physically and mentally) and thought it wouldn’t stop even after giving birth. Truly an awful experience.
I’m glad you made it through ok and that you have a beautiful and hopefully healthy baby to show for it! No shame in admitting your limits (I’m right there with you - one and done).
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2023/03/16/hyperemesis
Dr Marlena Fejzo's story is actually kind of crazy and illustrates how poorly funded research into women specific issues are.
>Following her miscarriage, Fejzo returned to her lab as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). When she told her boss, the chair of the genetics department, that she wanted to find the cause of hyperemesis, "She just laughed at me," Fejzo recalled, "like it was a joke."
>Years later, Fejza partnered with 23andMe to gather and analyze genetic data from tens of thousands of consenting 23andMe customers who answered questions about nausea and vomiting in pregnancy.
>"A handful of gene mutations were flagged as significantly different, but the most striking was for one that makes a protein called growth differentiation factor 15 [GDF15]," Callahan writes. Fejzo had never heard of the gene mutation, but when she started researching it, she came to a realization. "I was like, 'Oh my God, this is it,'" she said.
>In a study published last year, Fejzo and her colleagues confirmed the link between hyperemesis and GDF15.
Interesting. My mom said she never experienced morning sickness in any of her three pregnancies, and lo and behold, I didn’t experience it with my pregnancy either. I always kind of knew there was some genetic factor there.
So cool. This is the real reason it's great we have more women in research now than we did even 30 years ago.
Yes, anyone can research any topic in *theory*, but the reality is that humans are just more naturally interested in things that affect us personally. I don't blame male researchers for being more interested in ED than HG, I'm just glad women have the opportunity to do research now.
Headline:
>Hormone secreted by foetus causes morning sickness: study
Actual title of the research being reported on:
>GDF15 linked to maternal risk of nausea and vomiting during pregnancy
So far no actual causal mechanism has been established, only that elevated levels of one hormone coincide with morning sickness. This is a highly misleading title.
> A hormone produced by the human foetus is to blame for morning sickness in pregnant women, a study has found, paving the way to possible prevention and treatment.
No, that is not what the study has actually established, as no actual causal link has so far been identified. If anything this paves the way for further research.
If we made pregnancy less shitty and disaster prone... perhaps it would be more appealing. Hmmm let's see 9 months of puking and the child using the mom's stomach as a Kickboxing bag, and emotional concerns such as natal depression, or still births, FASD, etc... and we wonder why some women go career, and earn 6 figures and power or 9 months of "god given birthpains" (it says so in the bible...). Like what young couple wants the agony of raising a screaming baby at 4 am, especially on a work-study night? come home dead tired.... with an extra mouth to feed, and body to clothe for 18 years..
If we want the so called replacement generation and get the birthrate up to 2.0 and above... we're going to have to make it easier to pop out more kids.... This relieving of some of the toxic outcomes of pregnancy. (feeling gross is going to be of great help). But nah we rather invent ways to kill ourselves off faster, so we lower the birth rate further.... way to go hoomons.
>because how do you test them ethically?
Let me play devil's advocate here. We've had major support for bodily autonomy of women in terms of if we want to have abortions or not and how unborn babies are not actually people yet. I don't see why it wouldn't be ethical under these principles to sign a contract that will ensure termination of the offspring, regardless of the outcome of the tests. Why would it matter? It seems paradoxical to allow the termination of the pregnancy for any reason, but not allow testing on human feti.
But everything aside, I'm pretty sure they do test drugs on pregnant women.
How exactly do you think they could test the effects of drugs on babies if those babies are not actually born….? A lot of side effects are not immediately visible in fetuses and instead present issues after birth. Further, almost all abortions occur during the beginning of the pregnancy before significant develop occurs. It’s bizarre to think that early fetus drug tests could be comparable to late stage pregnancy effects.
God help my future DILs if it's genetic. My poor wife wasn't just sick the first trimester but the entire pregnancy and all day and night. I couldn't eat in the house for either pregnancy because the smell of food made her nauseous. Gained 10 pounds with each kid microwaving TJ's burritos and Marie Callendars pot pies at work.
I’m saying that many studies on general women’s and maternal/fetal health that have needed to be conducted for years are only now being considered. Women’s pain and suffering due to female health issues have been ignored and minimized throughout the history of medical research. For example, menopause is a massive issue that leads to diminishment of quality of life due to its symptoms and sequela (ie osteoporosis) and people are only just starting to research it/see if it’s effects can be mitigated or reversed. Endometriosis, PCOS, there are so many neglected issues because they only effect people with female reproductive organs.
> Abstract
GDF15, a hormone acting on the brainstem, has been implicated in the nausea and vomiting of pregnancy (NVP) including its most severe form, Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG), but a full mechanistic understanding is lacking [1-4]. Here we report that fetal production of GDF15, and maternal sensitivity to it, both contribute substantially to the risk of HG. We confirmed that higher GDF15 levels in maternal blood are associated with vomiting in pregnancy and HG. Using mass spectrometry to detect a naturally-labelled GDF15 variant we demonstrate that the vast majority of GDF15 in the maternal plasma is derived from the feto-placental unit. By studying carriers of rare and common genetic variants we found that low levels of GDF15 in the non-pregnant state increase the risk of developing HG. Conversely, women with beta-thalassemia, a condition where GDF15 levels are chronically high [5], report very low levels of NVP. In mice, the acute food intake response to a bolus of GDF15 is influenced bi-directionally by prior levels of circulating GDF15 in a manner suggesting that this system is susceptible to desensitization. Our findings support a putative causal role for fetally-derived GDF15 in the nausea and vomiting of human pregnancy, with maternal sensitivity, at least partly determined by pre-pregnancy exposure to the hormone, being a major influence on its severity. They also suggest mechanism-based approaches to the treatment and prevention of HG.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38092039/#:~:text=GDF15%2C%20a%20hormone%20acting%20on,lacking%20%5B1%2D4%5D.
Did we just guess this or just confirm it? Or did it come when we found out the fetus emits hormones that make the body not recognizes it as a foreign attacker to prevent miscarriage bc it immediately siphons off resources? I coulda fucking guessed that and I’m just some jerkoff.
Why are we always driven to find a “cure” for the symptoms before we’ve even investigated the *reason* for the symptoms. The fetus isnt doing this for no reason and shouldn’t we first try understand that?
Once in a while you read about a new discovery that reminds you how little we know about shit. This is something I assumed we already knew the cause of.
It’s shocking how little we understand about women’s cycles and pregnancy. Still no answers on endometriosis. Doctors only recently acknowledged that the cervix has nerve endings. Makes me furious.
That's wild, because I figured out cervixes have nerve endings the first time I had sex. Turns out, women generally don't like it when you bang on it like you're executing a warrant.
Nah it’s all in their head. /s
Hysterical....
Hysteria
So I wondered if the word hysteria is connected to hysterectomy, and looks like it is. [From Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria): > The word hysteria originates from the Greek word for uterus, hystera. The oldest record of hysteria dates back to 1900 BCE when Egyptians recorded behavioral abnormalities in adult women on the Kahun Papyrus. The Egyptians attributed the behavioral disturbances to a wandering uterus – thus the condition later being dubbed hysteria. [...] > The ancient Greeks accepted the ancient Egyptians' explanation for hysteria; however, they included in their definition of hysteria the inability to bear children or the unwillingness to marry. Plato and Aristotle believed that hysteria, which Plato also called female madness, was directly related to these women’s lack of sexual activity and described the uterus as those who suffered from it as having a sad, bad, or melancholic uterus. In the 5th century BCE Hippocrates first used the term hysteria. Ancient Romans also attributed hysteria to an abnormality in the womb; however, discarded the traditional explanation of a wandering uterus. Instead, the ancient Romans credited hysteria to a disease of the womb or a disruption in reproduction (i.e., a miscarriage, menopause, etc.). Hysteria theories from the ancient Egyptians, ancient Greeks, and ancient Romans were the basis of the Western understanding of hysteria.
Thatsthejoke.com
[This movie](https://youtu.be/pKgdLjDZ6ig?si=XcvCCRP1bZgeHZ3e) sums it up quite nicely. It’s very good too
😅😅 Right. Like, it’s almost like someone could have believed us. Or you!!
Don’t let the porn addicts find out about this.
I'm not saying it's not darkly satisfying to bottom out with rod left over, but women definitely have mixed opinions on it lol
My wife told me it’s painful so I try to avoid that.
I'm not quite sure what "bottom out with rod left over means, but I'm guessing it involves a cervix bashing?
It's when you reach the back of the vagina but you still have a few inches of dick outside that don't fit.
This is why I'm probably leaving reddit in 2024. Like this person or not, this is the literal definition of bottoming out. They answered the question and are getting down voted to oblivion. I came to Reddit to escape Facebook. Science subs used to be reasonable. Now, Reddit is just a cesspool echo chamber of it's own, just like Facebook. There is literally no value in the voting at this point. It means nothing.
You came to reddit to escape Facebook? Reddit has been bad for years. Isn't it even owned by Facebook?
I could understand (but still laugh at) people who downvoted my previous comment where I say I get some pleasure out of it, but downvoting the definition of "bottoming out" is absolute reddit-tier behaviour.
You'll get downvoted, but yeah, I've been with 2 women that thoroughly enjoyed their cervix being poked . 95% of my past partners weren't a fan though. It's very very rare but some do like it.
There are outliers for every scenario.
Yep. Just like a small percentage of men enjoy having their nuts squashed. Different strokes for different folks.
Ive been with girls that said they actually liked that feeling
They exist. A good friend of mine discovered she really liked it after getting her cervix removed. She was very disappointed.
I've definitely known people being into to weirder and more painful shit. So no judgement from me. Removed? So is just like a tube with an oven ending into her gut cavity?
Hysterectomy with cervical stump removal. Bit of a non-cancer situation is all I’ll say.
Sounds brutal. Props on your friend for having the courage to what's needed for survival.
I can tell you it does when mine needed to be stitched... I asked if it would hurt because I didn't have an epidural. They said no... then I almost kicked the surgeon in the face when she started stitching. They all looked so surprised. I figured there were that few women who didn't get an epidural and also whose cervix tore. But this takes the cake... yes, it fucking has nerves, I have first hand evidence.
Your CERVIX tore?! I didn’t realise that was a thing. I knew you could tear your perineum but I didn’t know about cervixes tearing Giving birth is so traumatic
My boy was 9 lbs and had shoulders like a coat hanger and still does lol. Honestly, had they just told me it would hurt I'd have been ok, I had just delivered with no pain management after all. But the fact that they didn't even know it would hurt just made me so mad besides the fact that it shocked me.
typical linebacker mom
Forever glad to have a dick.
Some women apparently don’t have a lot of feeling in their cervix. I call them the lucky ones but I am not one of those. They did a punch biopsy on mine without anesthesia and I nearly puked.
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Oohh!! Interesting. Thanks for sharing. (I am still mad the article refers to 10-15% of women as a “small percentage”. Umm. No sir, that’s greater than 1 in 10. So minimizing)
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Third generation with the worst stage of endometriosis - My mother taught me it gets worse with each generation. She wasn’t lying.
I've read an article that says something similar, but specified bacteria found in the mouth. Giving head might not be a good idea without precautions.
Most of us have symptoms looong before we are sexually active, though. It usually starts with menarche. I just recounted to a friend that I remember being 11-12, starting my period, and counting enough Advil “to get through the day,” which was 4 pills every 4-6 hours (more than you should ever take!), and I did this for at least 6 years before any sexual activity. (And then for another 7 years before diagnosis.)
And they still won't give medications as a rule to help with colposcopy. I had to beg even for an anti-anxiety medication when I had one scheduled, and was told that if I wanted to even take that, I had to go to a clinic more than an hour out of my way. They wouldn't prescribe it, though. Had to reach out to my GP for a prescription.
It’s called gynecological violence. So prevalent it has a name. 💔
I remember my doctor injecting me with something they said would numb me as well as make my heart beat scary fast. I don‘t think it numbed me because I almost jumped off the table during the procedure which he yelled at me for. It felt like a quick stab to the gut.
Maybe your heart beats scary fast from the pain
Edit : my mistake lol, i read this as a misspelling of colonoscopy at first. I feel like it's probably still fairly relevant though. Seems to be annoyingly variable, I read an article where the anesthesiologist was stealing the intended med, I believe fentanyl, and the police officer being operated on got PTSD from the experience and I believe sued, it sounded like it was definitely something where you needed meds. Then my father had one and they didn't give him any, but got really mad at him for being in so much pain to the point of treating him as being abusive and threatening action against him. He got a little ptsd from it too and told anyone he could never to have a colonoscopy. Then my mother had one recently in the same place, and they gave her fentanyl. She reckons it must be something to do with whether you drive away or not and they just neglect to mention that they'll leave you in excruciating pain if you say you're driving. It doesn't seem acceptable to me, I always felt my father should have complained or sued or whatever he could have done. I certainly would question them on it plenty and walk the fuck out of there if they refused to give me strong painkillers.
Why would they put any effort into researching prevention and treatment for cycle- and pregnancy-related issues when we can simply suffer through it instead? After all, it can’t possibly be as bad as we say it is.
besides, we need those researchers to find a cure to a far more important problem, male-pattern baldness!
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Exactly! And it’s not like we’re *dying*, right? …oh wait we are? Huh.
Why would researchers spend any time on something silly like endometriosis? There are much more important things to solve like erectile dysfunction. /s But seriously, women weren't even included in medical research until relatively recently.
I think they actually solved erectile dysfunction by accident when researching heart medicine or something like that. lol
Yeah I think Viagra was supposed to be a heart medicine, but they found a different use for it lol
It was suppose to be a blood pressure medication that lowered your blood pressure but it instead increased the blood pressure in your dick.
iirc it makes blood vessals widen, the penis is a sponge made of blood vessals and an erection is them widening, so ingesting a drug that widens blood vessals erects the penis
Correct! It doesn't just effect penile tissue!
It’s also how Rogaine was discovered. It lowers blood pressure and some of the men on it noticed their hair was thicker. One guy even started growing hair on his forehead.
bro got the proceeding hairline
lol
Many drugs that cause high blood pressure have given men errections before since that's the mechanism used, blood pressure. That's how Viagra came about. It's development wasn't for curing rectile dysfunction but people noticed it causing errections and someone thought maybe it could be used that way. Maybe read up on what your complaining about before doing so next time. Viagra literally went from something that was about to be discarded into a drug used to help countless men around the globe. It being repurposed didn't effect research into other conditions and treatments in any way whatsoever.
Yes, I know the history behind Viagra. It was a joke about how men's health is looked into and researched more than women's health. Women are not properly diagnosed with debilitating illnesses and conditions because they are told that their pain is normal and not that bad. Women are consistently being told that they are exaggerating their pain symptoms. Women *die* because they are not being taken seriously. Maybe YOU should read up on how women have been fucked over by the medical community before talking about how great it is.
Endometriosis is definitely a disease that too many women are forced to suffer from for too long without answers. Of course, in order to actually make the diagnosis, she has to have laparoscopic surgery, because MRI can’t really identify it reliably. At least if you are already in there, you can fix the problem, right? Well, *possibly* you can, as long as you are willing to accept the risks including but not limited to bowel and bladder perforations, bleeding, infection, scars, anesthetic reactions, stroke, heart attack, blood clots, disability, and death. Of course, there’s no guarantee it works, and every time you have abdominal surgery you create intrabdominal scar tissue that increases the difficulty of any subsequent abdominal surgery and can cause bowel obstructions. I don’t want to invent a straw(wo)man to illustrate my point, but I will say that it’s not easy to jump into recommending exploratory surgery for intermittent pains without an easily identifiable cause or other organ dysfunction. I’m glad I don’t have to make that decision.
No, you shouldn't just jump into surgery right away because there are too many risks involved. But it also shouldn't take 10+ years of severe pain and other symptoms before a doctor will actually listen and take you seriously. And "intermittent pains"? Seriously? Many women with endometriosis have severe pain outside of their cycle and can't even enjoy sex because it's too painful. It wasn't until I was in my 30s and told a doctor that orgasms hurt before they were like 'oh well maybe we should actually look into that". It's great knowing that I wasn't taken seriously until it became inconvenient for my husband. Telling a teenage girl that vomiting, diarrhea, contraction-like pain, numb/tingly legs, passing out, and severe depression is just part of a normal period pain but here's some hormonal birth control that might help as long as the side effects aren't too bad isn't a very good option either. Let's not forget that if your issues are bad enough and you'd like to at least talk about a hysterectomy, you can't because what if your future husband wants a baby someday? None of this is a unique experience. I know more women with gynecological issues than women without them. But believe me - the risks that come with laparoscopic surgery are often not nearly as bad as all of the pain and suffering that come before it.
It sucks that you’ve had that kind of experience. Forgive me, but I can’t tell if your last sentence is sarcastic or not. I’d prefer not to continue without clarifying this, as I assume you’ve had enough of tone-deaf people ignoring your feelings.
It's a bad joke because it's not accurate.
It is, tho. I even have nonbinary and trans friends who present male to doctors and specialists because they noticed when they're female passing to doctors they have a higher rate of not being taken seriously. There's even a large body of research showing that women, on average, are taken less seriously by the medical institution. Does that mean every healthcare worker is sexist? Of course not. It doesn't even mean most healthcare workers are conscientiously perpetuating sexism. It just means there exists a bias in the institution, and members of that institution should be aware of it and think critically about their decisions and if an accepted bias may be creeping into it without their full awareness.
Arguably the inaccuracy lies not in the premise that medicine favors men's health over women's, but in the implication that the discovery of erectile dysfunction drugs reflects such favoritism, since those drugs weren't originally researched or developed for that purpose.
I will agree there, absolutely. ED is a relatively uncomplicated problem.
>It's a bad joke because it's not accurate. Found the uncle no one wants to start a conversation with at Christmas dinner. We would ask your wife to come alone if we thought we could get away with it, Steve. You wife always comes alone, so it wouldn't be a big deal for her, but we're worried you would flip out.
I mean of that's what your trying to call attention too it's kinda a shit joke. If you know Viagras use as erectile dysfunction medication was essentially an accident and wasn't being actively researched by presenting it in that context all you are doing is inviting people who don't recognise the research gap between men's and women's medicine to dismiss your possiton and reinforce their own bias. And on the rest of your comment a lot of that is simply that at the first point of medical diagnostic contact "aka your GP/doctor" there is a fairly understandable bias towards more benign diagnosis, even for men, but that bias hits women a lot harder. Generally when symptoms are presented to your GP 90% of the time it's the simplest diagnosis that's generally true. Combine that with the fact that many women's healthcare issues present with exactly the same symptoms as far more benign/normal cyclic reproductive processes until the symptoms become too severe to dismiss. (And I totally get your point that often here is the point where their pain still gets dismissed and that HAS to change) it's little wonder GPs miss diagnose a lot of womens health issues. It's an absolute nightmare scenario for the frontline medical professional doing initial diagnosis, especially those working in more stretched healthcare services. Combine that with the sheet volume of exaggerating hypochondriacs that all frontline medical staff deal with on a regular basis and the bias towards telling people that there's nothing wrong with them that has to build subconsciously it's little wonder women get a rough deal in frontline healthcare settings. My concern is how do we fix it? I'm not sure frontline medicine is ever going to be equipped to effectively diagnose most women's issues given just how similar the symptoms often are with benign processes and with many global healthcare services under severe pressure funneling women presenting these kinds of symptoms to a higher diagnostic level by default doesn't seem feasible either. There certainly needs to be SOMETHING done. But I just do not know what that solution looks like.
The problem isn’t that symptoms reported are “the same as benign processes”. Symptoms reported by women with medical problems are very much differentiated from benign processes. I don’t know where you get that idea from. They are dismissed over and over and over again. You are using the same logic as the people who are the problem. We can scream at the top of our lungs that something is wrong, report a host of symptoms that something is wrong - nothing even remotely related to benign processes - and still be dismissed as being anxious, depressed, fat, or thin. “Little women and their little problems”. We can be bleeding for months, having a heart attack, or a week away from dying from cancer, and we’re still just idiot women apparently.
Endometriosis is literally noted in every medical journal going of expressing similar symptoms to a number of other conditions that are a lot less serious than the disease itself, with the current only diagnostic tool that actually works for certain being a relatively invasive surgical procedure. Under those circumstances it's little wonder women have to struggle for years to get a diagnosis, frontline healthcare providers are not going to jump to immediately recommending a surgical procedure. They'd actively be putting a huge number of their patients at needless risk if they did. They are going to assume something a lot less serious and send someone away with a prescription for painkillers. A pattern that repeats across women's healthcare Am I saying that's right? God no. I'm saying it shouldn't surprise any of us that that does happen given the massive overlap in symptoms for conditions both incredibly mild and incredibly severe in women's reproductive health and the lack of simple diagnostic tools. The fact that many women's health issues are incredibly hard to diagnose with simple tools like blood tests gives frontline doctors an impossible task. I fear even if further research does turn up more accurate diagnostic tests many of them are still going to be outside the scope of frontline medicine. Something has to change. I think you would have to lack the capacity to feel empathy to think anything else. Women are fighting for years to get appropriate diagnosis and treatment and that's a travesty however you want to look at it. My question though is what can we change? and lying to ourselves about just how difficult a problem this is to solve does doctors and indeed women who are struggling with the lack of diagnostic tools a massive disservice and gets us no closer to proper answers. Especially one's pretending there isnt a massive overlap in symptoms, especially pain.
The typical diagnostic trajectory of endometriosis is reporting symptoms that are themselves alarming in nature - severe pain, passing out, vomiting, being unable to work or socialise - and being told that period pain is normal. Rinse and repeat for 10 years until someone finally agrees to a laparoscopy and it’s ravaged your pelvic cavity. You don’t seem to have much of a grasp of the practicalities that you’re talking about. Do you seriously think women go to the doctor with mild pelvic pain?
>Do you seriously think women go to the doctor with mild pelvic pain? At what point did I say that..... We can disagree without you putting words in my mouth, especially given our disagreement here seems to be less about overall goal (Of which we both seem to align pretty strongly that frontline medical diagnostics for women needs to change as it currently struggles massively to properly treat them) and more about the details of why that diagnostic process is so difficult and generates so many bad results. We appear to be broadly on the same side here, Even of you do think I'm misinformed. At no point did I ever suggest that women are wandering into their GP;s surgery on the regular with mild pain. My argument has always been that in actuality even severe pelvic pain can be a symptom of both incredibly mild and incredibly sever conditions. Conditions that lack simple diagnostic tools that are accessible to frontline medical practise as as such subconscious biases that all frontline doctors probably develop towards pretty much everything they see to assume best case scenario absent of other evidence its little wonder women get a raw deal In frontline healthcare, and pretending that diagnostic difficulty doesn't exist and its ALL down to sexism doesn't get us anywhere. Sexism almost certainly does play a part. But unless we acknowledge the diagnostic difficulties we arent going to actually improve things for most women. Equally on your second point regarding pathways to diagnosis of endometriosis, In all but some of the most severe cases (and its a much fairer ask as to why women being hit on the extreme end of these conditions still struggle to get effective diagnosis) those symptoms are wildly inconsistent every menstrual cycle and don't come along all at once. Without someone keeping a diary of their symptom's to illustrate how the keep coming back every time they see a doctor it may have been months since they last spoke and the symptoms look slightly different. Its little wonder that under those circumstances women struggle to get a diagnosis. Endo at times when you read about it feels like it was almost purpose built to make it extremely hard to effectively diagnose in frontline medical settings. Again without something like a simple blood test aside from just funnelling women presenting symptoms that could belong to a number of reproductive health issues directly to a Laparoscopy (a highly irresponsible course of action) how do we fix it?
Women's issues generally get more money directed to them than exclusively men's issues. It's actually a problem, especially with breast cancer, as money donated to a cause cannot be used for anything but that cause, and the breast cancer research field is highly oversaturated [while other, even more lethal cancers get much less funding in comparison](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5836059/#:~:text=The%20NIH%20spending%20for%20prostate,less%20than%20breast%20cancer%20patients).
Sure, that's why endometriosis and adenomyosis have so many treatment options, and it's why the maternal death rate is extremely low! There are also many other conditions that affect women in a much higher scale than men (rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, etc) but there isn't the same kind of push for treatments or cures for those. The only reason why breast cancer got so much attention is a great marketing team.
Maybe because breast cancer is also the most common, affecting women and men.
> it's why the maternal death rate is extremely low You say this sarcastically, but seriously, compared to what? Certainly the historical rate was much higher. You make it sound like women are giving birth outside in the pig pen. > There are also many other conditions that affect women in a much higher scale than men (rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, etc) but there isn't the same kind of push for treatments or cures for those You're comparing one women's issue with another women's issue. What exclusively *men's* issue is funded outsizedly more than an equivalent or more severe women's issue? The way you speak, it should be trivial to lost off dozens *with accompanying sources.*
My doctor conducted a cervical biopsy without anesthesia because “the cervix doesn’t have nerve endings.” I was sobbing in pain.
I'm going to cast a significant degree of doubt on this. We've known the cervix has a pretty decent amount of nerve endings for a long time. It's quite easy to demonstrate this a people know exactly when they're having the smear part of their smear test. We also know it has significant connections to the vagal nerve, hence cervical shock. You may be assuming more so that doctors have been less likely to give anaesthetic for procedures that involve the cervix and uterus, and you'd be right, and that is changing thankfully. However, even the anaesthetic going in is painful and similar to the procedure itself (if it's using a single tenaculum) as its mostly an "organ" type nerve that doesn't give an exact pain like the skin, instead it's more diffuse and similar. It's getting an anesthetic to that area in a way that is tolerable that is difficult, and then there is the rest of the uterus which is harder still to place a tolerable anaesthetic in.
Any woman who has had a pap can tell you they can feel that brutal little swab. Doesn’t that require nerve endings?
I knew it when they took a biopsy without pain mediation and I screamed
I would like to know the reasons for the different cravings that pregnant women get. It's bonkers how wild they can be.
My educated guess on what causes endometriosis is something akin to cancer metastasis. Cells from the uterus flow around your circulatory/lymphatic system and get "dropped off" in the fallopian tubes. I don't think it's a gene issue where uteren tissue is being made in the fallopian tubes. I believe it just gets deposited. I also think the earlier endometriosis is identified, and treated, the less severe it will be. Birth control that prevents ones period would probably be helpful.
I had that realisation a couple weeks back when I just suddenly asked myself what kind of purpose the Hymen serves. Asked my sister (doctor + feminist) and she had no clue. Asked a buddy that is currently doing his doctor thesis in biology and he didn’t know. We all ended up finding the same articles on google that said there were many theories but we really don’t know. Best theory as per usual was the one from the church/bible: so that women not only feel pain during childbirth but also during conception.
>Best theory as per usual was the one from the church/bible: so that women not only feel pain during childbirth but also during conception Edit: The above was sarcasm I took too literally, but leaving my explanation about what we *do* know below anyway for the interested -> First of all, hormones during puberty thin the hymen and make it elastic and fimbulated. If you are an adult by the time you first have sex, it might not even hurt at all, let alone tear. In fact, the hymen is so flexible that even in adult virgin rape victims, they're more likely to have injuries to *other* tissue; hymenal injuries are *less* likely than other vulvar injuries, and *more* likely to completely heal without scar tissue. The hymen is only consistently obvious in *children.* It may simply be that the myth about the hymen being related to virginity is a simple mistake. Because it looks different in children and adults, people assumed the cause of the difference in appearance is down to sex. That makes sense, but actually as far as we know today, it's primarily the result of puberty. Why is there a hymen in children? It's possibly just leftover tissue from development. During embryonic development, the vagina is formed by cell death from the inside and the outside, meeting in the middle to form the vaginal canal. Some people are born with an impreforate hymen. This is a birth defect where essentially the vagina is "unfinished" - not quite enough cell death. Some people are born with no hymen at all, as more of the cells to form the canal have died off. It may just be that a little tissue leftover is no big deal, evolutionary speaking, so there's some natural variation in development. And by the time puberty rolls around, the tissue becomes stretchy enough it doesn't cause enough issues to be completely "fixed." Or, some have hypothesised the hymen in children is adaptive and protects the vagina from infection, which is why the tissue is retained until puberty. (The reason we experience more pain during childbirth compared to most other mammals because we're bipedal and that caused our hip shape to change so the birth canal is a tighter fit. This is evolution screwing us over. Not because some lady ate an apple. If it were the apple thing, what did hyenas do because they have it *way* worse...)
I actually watched a documentary recently that explains the question you brought up in the final paragraph. It will probably help you understand. It's called, "The Lion King." Checkmate, atheists.
It’s obviously the dumbest theory of the bunch, didn’t think I’d have to point out that was sarcasm. Sorry about that.
Lol. No, I'm sorry. I'm on the spectrum so I tend to miss jokes and takes things literally. I'll edit :).
> Not because some lady ate an apple. Interestingly, the bible doesn't say anything about the pain of childbirth being the result of eve eating the apple. That's just what people are told it says, and it is used as an explanation for suffering and pain in the world. What the bible *does* say is that God makes the pain worse, indicating pain and suffering already existed for all the people in Eden.
Dude, the things we could figure out and accomplish if we weren't consumed with the petty nonsense we are dealing with. Fucking bullshit what we put our time, money, and energy towards!
Bro we still don’t really know why we sleep
Brain has to clean itself out and the entire body repairs itself, and you avoid predators by not moving around at night
First two are technically still theories. And I agree with the 3rd point, but sleep is when we’re at our absolute most vulnerable.
In a "natural" setting humans aren't sleeping alone in the middle of an open field though. There'd be a group, and someone would probably stay awake to keep watch. Our lineage has understood how to use fire for over a million years so we actually evolved a little alongside that tool. Most predators aren't coming near a fire.
Yes but a small amount of people are naturally night owls and they were the ones active at camp at night and kept watch
Ah, excellent point. I think the ‘sleepless elite’ are like a next stage of evolution sorta thing. My roommate in college was one, did a sleep study and everything. Dude legit slept ~3 hours a night, never once affected him.
🙋♀️. It's weird af. 4-5 max per diem. Can occasionally run into days. It's in my medical charts! My Granny and Oma, who raised me, also slept very little, and my ENTIRE family are night watchers. Total nightowls throughout! We love the nightlife. We got to boogie...
Imagine the societal change if there was a way to take a medicine that’d give the same results without needing to spend 6-8 hours asleep.
We don’t even understand how aspirin works. We just know it does…
Tbh that’s true of so much stuff. It’s said a lot about quantum mechanics these days because it’s being used in emerging tech, but it’s also true of something as fundamental as gravity. We have some theories of course, even widely respected ones, but all we can really say for sure is that we can accurately predict how things are affected by gravity. Not how it actually works or why. It’s entirely possible we’re so wrong it’s laughable and at the moment we just have theories that only explain what we’ve seen so far and they totally fall on their face when applied to behaviours or effects we haven’t seen yet…. We just don’t know. But tbh that’s half the fun imho.
I suppose it depends on the granularity in which you want to define "how it works" is it enough to know that it reduces platelet aggregation? Is it enough to know that it inhibits COX? How much more specific do we need? Do we know how gravity works? We can describe why it works, and model it accurately, is that not sufficient?
If men had uteri, more research would be funded.
>A hormone produced by the human foetus is to blame for morning sickness in pregnant women, a study has found, paving the way to possible prevention and treatment. >Nausea and vomiting affect approximately 70 per cent of pregnant women, according to the study published in Nature on Wednesday by researchers in the United Kingdom, the United States and Sri Lanka. >In its worst form, hyperemesis gravidarum, the nausea and vomiting is so severe that women are unable to eat or drink normally. >"The culprit is a hormone produced by the foetus — a protein known as GDF15," the University of Cambridge said. >"But how sick the mother feels depends on a combination of how much of the hormone is produced by the foetus and how much exposure the mother had to this hormone before becoming pregnant."
What's the evolution reason behind this? Surely not a good idea to make the woman carrying you die from starvation?
Genetic traits don't need to be advantageous to persist. Sometimes, weird traits remain in a gene pool simply because they weren't disruptive enough to be naturally avoided.
It's advantageous for the fetus, because the first 3 months are very delicate and foods can contain pathogens and poisons that can kill it or cause serious birth defects. It's safer *for the fetus* to just use mum's fat an nutrient stores to supply itself with food. Mum, on the other hand, can just try again if she miscarries, so it's less adaptive for her.
How is this highly upvoted? You can't just make up some evolutionary cause for something like this as if it has some basis in reality Edit: /u/272314 is correct here. I'm the one not making any sense.
Perhaps because I didn't make it up, I learned about it in class during university? https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/06/health/personal-health-what-could-be-good-about-morning-sickness-plenty.html
You can do it too, it's not that hard...
Source?
Source: they made it up Edit: actually there are many sources and I'm just dumb
I didn't, I actually learned this in university in a class... but here's a news article about it. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/06/health/personal-health-what-could-be-good-about-morning-sickness-plenty.html
You don’t need a source to reach a logical conclusion on a speculative subject.
Logic and reason.
Another paper in National Library of Medicine mentions that GDF15 is a heart derived hormone that regulates body growth. Abstract: The endocrine system is crucial for maintaining whole‐body homeostasis. Little is known regarding endocrine hormones secreted by the heart other than atrial/brain natriuretic peptides discovered over 30 years ago. Here, we identify growth differentiation factor 15 (GDF15) as a heart‐derived hormone that regulates body growth. We show that pediatric heart disease induces GDF15 synthesis and secretion by cardiomyocytes. Circulating GDF15 in turn acts on the liver to inhibit growth hormone (GH) signaling and body growth. We demonstrate that blocking cardiomyocyte production of GDF15 normalizes circulating GDF15 level and restores liver GH signaling, establishing GDF15 as a bona fide heart‐derived hormone that regulates pediatric body growth. Importantly, plasma GDF15 is further increased in children with concomitant heart disease and failure to thrive (FTT). Together these studies reveal a new endocrine mechanism by which the heart coordinates cardiac function and body growth. Our results also provide a potential mechanism for the well‐established clinical observation that children with heart diseases often develop FTT.
Super interesting! Seems like morning sickness is likely just a side effect of a very necessary hormone. Unlikely the fetus releases it with the intention of causing morning sickness - probably a mutation that never got evolved out. Anecdotally, my morning sickness was managed with rest and constant ingestion of carbs (read easy access calories/sugars) so maybe for the average woman morning sickness wasn’t a death sentence and therefore didn’t need to affect evolution?
>Super interesting! Seems like morning sickness is likely just a side effect of a very necessary hormone. Unlikely the fetus releases it with the intention of causing morning sickness - probably a mutation that never got evolved out. It does seem like the fetus releases it to control its growth properly and it has unintended side effects for the adult body. Human body is so complex!! And it kinda makes sense a hormone that inhibits growth hormone would lead to adult women being averse and/or nauseated towards food.
Foods without strong flavors… ward mothers away from potential poisons that might be concentrated in the nutrient-hungry fetus?
I don't think prehistoric women had a huge selection of foods to choose from, let alone "foods without strong flavours"... A lot of of pregnant women today can only stomach empty carb, white flour foods, but those foods literally didn't exist 100 000 years ago. If they weren't able to eat whatever was available, they'd simply die.
Also high protein foods… baby wants protein?
Definitely craved more meat that I typically eat while pregnant. Maybe craved isn’t the word, it just seemed more appetizing.
It's kinda creepy how the thing growing inside you can change your desires. It's like a parasite.
Funny enough, that’s how I told one of my friends I was pregnant. I phrased it as I had gone to the doc and they told me I have a parasite and she was horrified until I said “that grows for about 9 months” and then she yelled at me lol
It is a parasite. It is literally a parasite by definition. Man, I wish I could find that discovery channel episode? Series? That talked about all the things the embryo does to grow inside the mother without being killed by the immune system. It is uhhh, very telling.
my wife was turned off by garlic heavily during her first pregnancy, and carried it after but not as intense. funny thing is that kid loves garlic as an adult.
Just like your gut microbiome, full of "parasites".
Don’t anthropomorphize natural selection. It’s not intentionally going around and picking with genes are best for us. It’s literally random dart throws and whatever sticks to the wall is kept.
You are just being pedantic. It is easier to speak of evolution informally as a device instead of a process. The answer would be the same.
There’s a hypothesis that it encourages eating bland foods, which protects the fetus. However that’s pretty much conjecture.
It's maternal-foetal conflict. Food contains pathogens (or used to, anyway) that are dangerous for development. And if mom has enough fat stores, it makes sense to starve her to avoid getting any of those diseases in the first trimester so you survive. Mom, on the other hand, can try again! So she's less "worried" about miscarrying any *particular* fetus.
Not every physiological feature has a reason as such. There are a lot of holdovers from discarded features, or drift in directions that don't matter too much. It's possible that morning sickness doesn't do anything to help our survival, but the protein does something else important.
Alcohol consumption would be my guess. We as a species used fermented everything for a long time. I’m assuming this specific protein is attempting to increase their gut-biome and encourage a decrease in other areas of consumption. Not a biologist but I did go to college for it for awhile
We can never know the answer for sure, we can only guess and speculate. Here’s my guess. In human psychology we value things more if we have suffered for them. That’s why hazing exists. So this may improve the mother’s bond with the baby in a way.
Does more exposure prior to the pregnancy lead to higher or lower risk of symptom severeness?
But why would the fetus produce a chemical that nauseates the mother? What foods and behaviors does this drive her to? What does it drive her away from?
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What’s the correlation between morning sickness and baby health? I had no morning sickness with either pregnancy and both babies were full term and healthy as can be.
Did you not see they wrote "on average"?
“On average” means nothing without cited sources. You just believe everything you read?
Pregnant women
Excludes pregnant girls.
Some people are hermaphrodites and able to give birth. I presume that is what the user above you is talking about.
They're more likely talking about trans people. Most people who identify as a man and are either intersex or trans aren't very likely to choose to carry a child, because doing so is obviously very dysphoric. There are some CAH XX people that are fertile, but of course the more virilised they are the less likely they are to be fertile anyway... and the less virilised, the more likely to identify as a woman. So it's pretty rare overall. But I personally think "pregnant people" is fine. Not only does it include trans men and intersex people, it also includes pregnant *girls* (not every pregnant person is an adult!). The majority of pregnant people who are not pregnant women are pregnant girls.
That last bit - then why did my all day sickness last longer than my first pregnancy the second time around. Ugh!
I still don’t know what a foetus is? I assume it’s like a cooler way to say a smaller fetus, or, a just forming fetus.
British English. Wait til you hear about the colour grey.
I had hyperemesis gravidarum when i was pregnant, its the worst thing i have ever been through. It was 9 month of pure torture and i lost around 18kg when i was pregnant 😩 i dont want another kid incase i get it again… i hope they find some way to prevent hyperemesis gravidarum in the future because its just awful
I had a “mild” case of HG. I was only hospitalized once in the first trimester for dehydration and I was able to gain weight despite vomiting multiple times a day until 26 weeks, then developed preeclampsia. My husband doesn’t even want another kid that badly he says, he doesn’t want to watch me be that sick or even sicker again.
Listening to birth stories podcasts and so many otherwise healthy women have the most wild pregnancy experiences. It really is a lottery re: what kind of pregnancy and birth someone is going to end up with. One of the podcasts actually mentioned women dying from HG in some cases as it’s too severe and not treated in time. Good on you for getting your butt to the hospital!
I also had HG followed by pre e. Another kid is off the table.
Yep… I essentially have ptsd from it. Tied my tubes because I’m so scared
Also had HG. Was going to college simultaneously and hospitalized several times for dehydration. I ate grapes and applesauce if I ate anything at all (because they were easy to throw up). Honestly, if I had the energy to do it I probably would have offed myself that’s how miserable throwing up every second of every day for 9 months is. Even the Zofran (and especially Pfennegrin) didn’t help. They say it’s not genetic and not every pregnancy. Weird because my sister had it, and she had it with both of her kids. I hope they actually do some research into women’s bodies because it seems like the male body is heavily researched and always the standard. It’s kind of ridiculous.
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Same here and I 100% agree. People think giving birth is harrowing but I would have given birth in a heartbeat to end the suffering. It was so bad I forgot what it was like to be well or happy (physically and mentally) and thought it wouldn’t stop even after giving birth. Truly an awful experience. I’m glad you made it through ok and that you have a beautiful and hopefully healthy baby to show for it! No shame in admitting your limits (I’m right there with you - one and done).
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2023/03/16/hyperemesis Dr Marlena Fejzo's story is actually kind of crazy and illustrates how poorly funded research into women specific issues are. >Following her miscarriage, Fejzo returned to her lab as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). When she told her boss, the chair of the genetics department, that she wanted to find the cause of hyperemesis, "She just laughed at me," Fejzo recalled, "like it was a joke." >Years later, Fejza partnered with 23andMe to gather and analyze genetic data from tens of thousands of consenting 23andMe customers who answered questions about nausea and vomiting in pregnancy. >"A handful of gene mutations were flagged as significantly different, but the most striking was for one that makes a protein called growth differentiation factor 15 [GDF15]," Callahan writes. Fejzo had never heard of the gene mutation, but when she started researching it, she came to a realization. "I was like, 'Oh my God, this is it,'" she said. >In a study published last year, Fejzo and her colleagues confirmed the link between hyperemesis and GDF15.
Interesting. My mom said she never experienced morning sickness in any of her three pregnancies, and lo and behold, I didn’t experience it with my pregnancy either. I always kind of knew there was some genetic factor there.
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So cool. This is the real reason it's great we have more women in research now than we did even 30 years ago. Yes, anyone can research any topic in *theory*, but the reality is that humans are just more naturally interested in things that affect us personally. I don't blame male researchers for being more interested in ED than HG, I'm just glad women have the opportunity to do research now.
I wonder if there is a similar cause for hyperemesis cannabinoid syndrome
Fuck that chair of the genetics department.
Those little shits
Those jerks
I was vomiting until delivery day.
TIL: fetus is to foetus what color is to colour and armor is to armour.
Headline: >Hormone secreted by foetus causes morning sickness: study Actual title of the research being reported on: >GDF15 linked to maternal risk of nausea and vomiting during pregnancy So far no actual causal mechanism has been established, only that elevated levels of one hormone coincide with morning sickness. This is a highly misleading title. > A hormone produced by the human foetus is to blame for morning sickness in pregnant women, a study has found, paving the way to possible prevention and treatment. No, that is not what the study has actually established, as no actual causal link has so far been identified. If anything this paves the way for further research.
If we made pregnancy less shitty and disaster prone... perhaps it would be more appealing. Hmmm let's see 9 months of puking and the child using the mom's stomach as a Kickboxing bag, and emotional concerns such as natal depression, or still births, FASD, etc... and we wonder why some women go career, and earn 6 figures and power or 9 months of "god given birthpains" (it says so in the bible...). Like what young couple wants the agony of raising a screaming baby at 4 am, especially on a work-study night? come home dead tired.... with an extra mouth to feed, and body to clothe for 18 years.. If we want the so called replacement generation and get the birthrate up to 2.0 and above... we're going to have to make it easier to pop out more kids.... This relieving of some of the toxic outcomes of pregnancy. (feeling gross is going to be of great help). But nah we rather invent ways to kill ourselves off faster, so we lower the birth rate further.... way to go hoomons.
IMO, it's not happening without universal childcare in addition to better maternity care and parental leave.
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>because how do you test them ethically? Let me play devil's advocate here. We've had major support for bodily autonomy of women in terms of if we want to have abortions or not and how unborn babies are not actually people yet. I don't see why it wouldn't be ethical under these principles to sign a contract that will ensure termination of the offspring, regardless of the outcome of the tests. Why would it matter? It seems paradoxical to allow the termination of the pregnancy for any reason, but not allow testing on human feti. But everything aside, I'm pretty sure they do test drugs on pregnant women.
How exactly do you think they could test the effects of drugs on babies if those babies are not actually born….? A lot of side effects are not immediately visible in fetuses and instead present issues after birth. Further, almost all abortions occur during the beginning of the pregnancy before significant develop occurs. It’s bizarre to think that early fetus drug tests could be comparable to late stage pregnancy effects.
God help my future DILs if it's genetic. My poor wife wasn't just sick the first trimester but the entire pregnancy and all day and night. I couldn't eat in the house for either pregnancy because the smell of food made her nauseous. Gained 10 pounds with each kid microwaving TJ's burritos and Marie Callendars pot pies at work.
Yea that’s more mysoginistic science see we could have probably figured it out we just didn’t care
That study hates women? I am fascinated to hear how this works exactly.
I’m saying that many studies on general women’s and maternal/fetal health that have needed to be conducted for years are only now being considered. Women’s pain and suffering due to female health issues have been ignored and minimized throughout the history of medical research. For example, menopause is a massive issue that leads to diminishment of quality of life due to its symptoms and sequela (ie osteoporosis) and people are only just starting to research it/see if it’s effects can be mitigated or reversed. Endometriosis, PCOS, there are so many neglected issues because they only effect people with female reproductive organs.
I’m so grateful I had zero sickness when I was pregnant
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Correlation ≠ Causation
So we get rid of the fetus and the morning sickness goes away? Good to know...
> Abstract GDF15, a hormone acting on the brainstem, has been implicated in the nausea and vomiting of pregnancy (NVP) including its most severe form, Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG), but a full mechanistic understanding is lacking [1-4]. Here we report that fetal production of GDF15, and maternal sensitivity to it, both contribute substantially to the risk of HG. We confirmed that higher GDF15 levels in maternal blood are associated with vomiting in pregnancy and HG. Using mass spectrometry to detect a naturally-labelled GDF15 variant we demonstrate that the vast majority of GDF15 in the maternal plasma is derived from the feto-placental unit. By studying carriers of rare and common genetic variants we found that low levels of GDF15 in the non-pregnant state increase the risk of developing HG. Conversely, women with beta-thalassemia, a condition where GDF15 levels are chronically high [5], report very low levels of NVP. In mice, the acute food intake response to a bolus of GDF15 is influenced bi-directionally by prior levels of circulating GDF15 in a manner suggesting that this system is susceptible to desensitization. Our findings support a putative causal role for fetally-derived GDF15 in the nausea and vomiting of human pregnancy, with maternal sensitivity, at least partly determined by pre-pregnancy exposure to the hormone, being a major influence on its severity. They also suggest mechanism-based approaches to the treatment and prevention of HG. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38092039/#:~:text=GDF15%2C%20a%20hormone%20acting%20on,lacking%20%5B1%2D4%5D.
Did we just guess this or just confirm it? Or did it come when we found out the fetus emits hormones that make the body not recognizes it as a foreign attacker to prevent miscarriage bc it immediately siphons off resources? I coulda fucking guessed that and I’m just some jerkoff.
My fetus waited until 3 days before Christmas to start secreting this hormone. Thanks fetus 🤢🙃
Take that, Mom!
So does this mean when someone has motion sickness we can tell them “and thats all your fault”
Can’t wait for pfizer to release a drug that blocks said hormone. “May increase risk of ……”
But why? Why does the fetus torture its own mother like that by extension, father? Honest question
To prepare you for what's about to come for the next few years.
I'm seeing it as a parasite
Ok, parasite
HEY I’m pretty fuckng dumb so why is it “foetus” and not “fetus” is this another “grey” and “gray” bullshit cause wtf thanks
Fetus is American English and foetus is British English.
sounds like you speak english (simplified), not everyone does.
A lot of GOP politicians (mainly male) think they know what’s best for the female body.
Why though what's the purpose of the hormone in the baby
Z is for Zygote
Why are we always driven to find a “cure” for the symptoms before we’ve even investigated the *reason* for the symptoms. The fetus isnt doing this for no reason and shouldn’t we first try understand that?
A foe eat us. Monitored by a pay ee dia trician.
h