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Pregnancy and Lactation Weekly Digest

For the Week Ending October 2, 2022. 

COVID-19 Vaccines International Pregnancy Exposure Registry (C-VIPER)

More than 8,000 pregnant vaccinated women are already participating in our survey.

Help us understand the impact of COVID-19 vaccines on pregnancy and babies. Be a part of it!

Click here to Register

A cure for infertility (in mice)

One of the causes of infertility is faulty ovulation. Scientists have fixed this defect–in mice. The mice were lacking a protein that the cells surrounding the egg use to signal the egg that it is time to mature, and the scientists were able to inject the gene for the protein into those cells. Read more here.

This is important for you because infertility is on the rise, and assisted reproduction is difficult and expensive.

Amy Schumer, mom

Amy Schumer got famous as a sex comic. She’s now forty-one, married, and has a three year old son, Gene (who she bore on camera).  Read more here.

This is important for you because “As Schumer has aged onstage, the body has remained a major subject, but she now focuses more on the way it disintegrates with motherhood than on the way it’s seen by men.”

RADx® Tech for Maternal Health Challenge

The National Institutes of Health is offering up to $8 million in cash prizes to accelerate development of home-based or point-of-care diagnostic devices, wearables, and other remote sensing technologies to improve maternal health outcomes for those who live in areas lacking access to maternity care. NICHD, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), and the NIH Office of the Director are co-sponsoring this challenge as part of NIH’s Implementing a Maternal health and PRegnancy Outcomes Vision for Everyone (IMPROVE) Initiative. Read more here.

This is important for you because “Many maternal deaths are preventable if the health problem is identified early, but millions of women in the United States live in areas with limited or no access to maternity care,” said Diana W. Bianchi, M.D., director of NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

Yes, you can take Tylenol

There are pending lawsuits claiming that taking Tylenol (a lot of Tylenol) during pregnancy is associated with a later diagnosis of autism or ADHD. But the evidence is extremely shaky; the lawsuits are much more about the money at stake than about the risk. Read more here.

This is important for you because “the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine state that Tylenol is safe during pregnancy.” 

The most popular article on The Pulse this week was Pregistry’s Friday Recipe: Quick Refrigerator Pickles. Read it here.

The National Institutes of Health is offering up to $8 million in cash prizes to accelerate development of technologies to improve maternal health outcomes for those who live in areas lacking access to maternity care. The Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics Technology (RADx® Tech) for Maternal Health Challenge prioritizes home-based or point-of-care diagnostic devices, wearables and other remote sensing technologies to improve postpartum healthcare in these regions. The postpartum period is defined as the first year after giving birth or the end of a pregnancy, and it accounts for a large proportion of maternal deaths in the United States.

“Many maternal deaths are preventable if the health problem is identified early, but millions of women in the United States live in areas with limited or no access to maternity care,” said Diana W. Bianchi, M.D., director of NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), which is administering the challenge. “The goal of this challenge is to develop easy-to-use technologies for people or their local health clinics to assess whether additional medical care is needed after delivery.”

The most popular article on The Pulse this week was Pregistry’s Friday Recipe: Quick Refrigerator Pickles. Read it here.

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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