Largely scientists have viewed human pregnancy through the lens of an anti-inflammatory process. The embryo in the mother’s uterus needs to be protected from the mother’s immune system that would otherwise attack it as foreign matter. Yet, at the same time, inflammation is a key part of human pregnancy, both at the beginning and end, despite the danger, it poses to the fetus.
In a new study from Yale, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers have a new understanding of the role of inflammation in the procreation process by studying the pregnancy of marsupials.
*Marsupials are considered an intermediary step between mammals who lay eggs, called monotremes, and mammals with live births, also called eutherian mammals. The study focused on a species of opossum with a 14-day pregnancy, 12 of those days spent in an eggshell with only 2 days in a placenta.
Researchers found that when the fetuses produced a digestive enzyme to break out of the shell, the enzyme caused an inflammatory reaction in the maternal tissues, which in turn prompted the production of a placenta by the mother’s body.
Because inflammation is not amenable to a full term human pregnancy, researchers posit that the inflammation triggered by an embryo’s presence has evolved to become a communication process between embryo and womb.
Understanding inflammation this way could be a major shifting in thinking when it comes to **IVF treatments. Currently, the thought is that reducing inflammation is vital to ensuring embryo implantation along with boosting embryo viability. Since 75 percent of IVF failures occur at the implantation stage, technologies have focused on bettering embryos rather than improving uterine acceptance levels. And although, doctors have observed that success rates decrease in patients using anti-inflammatory protocols, like ibuprofen, the cause behind this was not clear.
This new study suggests that both the uterus and the embryo are responsible for the implantation success. The inflammation caused by the embryo is a preparation signal for the uterus. Instead of reducing inflammation, IVF treatments should instead encourage the inflammation, through techniques like scratching, to boost success rates.
Yale researchers hope that this new study will mark a change in doctors’ treatment and understanding of inflammation during pregnancy.
**In vitro fertilization (IVF) is a fertility treatment in which sperm and eggs are combined in a laboratory. The resulting embryos are assessed for quality, and one or more are placed in the uterus through the cervix. Source: babycenter.com
*Marsupials are any members of the mammalian infraclass Marsupialia. All extant marsupials are endemic to Australasia and the Americas. A distinctive characteristic common to these species is that most of the young are carried in a pouch. Well-known marsupials include kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, possums, opossums, wombats, Tasmanian devils, and the recently extinct thylacines. Source: Wikipedia
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