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Pregnancy and Lactation Weekly Digest

For the Week Ending November 7, 2021. 

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.

Parenting books

One might be forgiven for thinking that parenting books are for parents. But all too often, they have pretty much been a vehicle for male “experts” to make mothers feel bad. Read more here.

This is important for you because if you want to read books to get parenting advice, just remember that the author has a particular agenda and does not have all the answers.

Killer babies with laser eyes

Not only does The Boys’ Billy Butcher get an action figure, but for a mere $40 extra, that action figure can come with a baby that shoots LED beams out of its eyes. Read more here.

This is important for you because it’s the must-have item of the holiday season?

COVID and boys

A study of over a thousand people who were infected with or vaccinated against COVID-19 while pregnant indicates that those carrying male fetuses generated fewer antibodies against the pathogen than those carrying female fetuses. The disease had long been recognized to hit men harder than women, as do most infectious diseases. But what is new here is that the fetus’ sex affects the mother’s immune response. Read more here.

This is important for you because (1) it underscores that pregnant people should be included in clinical research, and (2) you should get vaccinated if you haven’t already, since getting COVID-19 while pregnant can cause complications and most people who contract the disease have not been vaccinated against it.

Embryos reset their biological clocks 

Eggs and sperm age along with the people who bear them; but once they come together at conception, the embryo’s age effectively gets reset to zero. Understanding how this happens may help to treat age-related diseases. Read more here.

This is important for you because this work was done in mice, but now that some restrictions have been lifted on studying human stem cell development we can see if (and how) this happens in humans as well.

The most popular article on The Pulse this week was Outdoor Exercise Improves Health During and After Pregnancy. 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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