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Pregnancy and Lactation Weekly Digest

For the Week Ending July 25, 2021. 

More than 12,000 pregnant and recently pregnant women are already participating. Help us understand the impact of COVID-19 on pregnancy and babies. Be a part of it!

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Dr. Murray Elkin

Cochrane is an organization that collates medical studies so doctors can make informed health decisions. The obstetrician Murray Elkin helped found it. He was known for promoting evidence-based clinical trials for perinatal care. Read more here.

This is important for you because he fought for things like allowing fathers in the delivery room and recognizing midwifery as a profession.

Sleep consultants

If your baby doesn’t sleep, neither do you. And sleep deprivation is really, really difficult. Are expensive sleep consultants worth it, or are they a scam? Read more here.

This is important for you because not sleeping is not an option. If you’ve tried everything and nothing has yet worked, an outside consultant may be able to help you out.

Placental oxygen

An anterior placenta is attached to the front of a pregnant woman’s uterus, whereas a posterior placenta is attached to the back. Researchers have just invented a device that can measure oxygen levels in an anterior placenta, which is associated with more pregnancy complications than a posterior placenta. It works like the pulse oximeter you can put on your finger to measure the percentage of oxygen in your blood. Read more here.

This is important for you because although this is a small study, placental problems are serious but difficult to identify, diagnose, and track so any new methodology that can do so is helpful. This one is noninvasive, which makes it even better.

The WHO Global Strategy to Reduce the Harmful Use of Alcohol 

The WHO recommends that pregnant women and women of childbearing age should be prevented from drinking alcohol to keep fetuses safe. If that sounds ludicrous and overbearing to you, it sounded that way to Dr. Jen Gunter too; the internet’s favorite OB/GYN and Goop-basher suggested that men of impregnating age (i.e. pretty much all of them) should be prevented from drinking alcohol to keep fetuses safe, since drunken men are more likely to beat their pregnant partners.  Read more here.

This is important for you because she is PISSED, and she is right.

Diana Gitig
Dr. Diana Gitig has a Ph.D. in cell biology and genetics from Cornell University, and has been writing about issues in biology – from molecular biology to cancer to immunology to neuroscience to nutrition to agriculture - for the past fifteen years. She has three teenaged children.

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