GynoFiles

As medical testing has become more available and accurate we are diagnosing more women with autoimmune diseases one of which is the condition that is called antiphospholipid syndrome.. It is a condition that is known to lead to miscarriages, small babies, the hypertensive disease preeclampsia, stillbirth and preterm birth. The actual cause of pregnancy problems is linked to problems with the placenta and up to 70% of all pregnancies in women with this will miscarry if not treated properly. Women with antiphospholipid syndrome will produce that produce microscopic sized blood clots in the blood vessels of the placenta that in turn produces the pregnancy complications. Having antiphospholipid syndrome also produces risk of blood clots in mom during and after pregnancy and requires treatment in most cases.

Low dose aspirin is the new way to prevent a second and third miscarriage is to begin aspirin before becoming pregnant has now been shown to be effective in a new study .They studied women of ages 18 to 40, who had had one or miscarriages, and those who miscarried at any point. Beginning low dose aspirin therapy before conception i increased conception rates by 28% in women with a history of only one pregnancy loss of second miscarriage such as checking the lining of that baby bed (the uterus) is read y including hormonal checks and infection checks February 2014 Fertility and Sterility Other tests including an endometrial biopsy and hormone measurements to check on the progesterone levels, and further more evaluating gynecologic problems like fibroids, or  medication use, lack of vitamins or other nutritional deficiencies, chromosomal problems, or perhaps problems with the male sperm count. And if problems are identified then treating them. Some women are ready physically bu...

With the advent of early pregnancy tests we now have found many women who have had repeat or recurrent miscarriages. Your gyno will check may aspects of your health to help you avoid repeat miscarriages, including treating uterine or cervical infections, giving hormonal therapies for those with lower placental progesterone production, correcting nutritional problems like diabetes, as well as searching for abnormalities of the uterus itself that can cause miscarriages. And if those don't reveal the problem, looking for abnormalities in the sperm can reveal the cause of the miscarriage. But now there is another test that is specifically for those who have had more than one miscarriage: looking for chromosome reasons in mom, dad, and the fetal tissue. The test is called Anora, miscarriage test , and it is done of the products of conception, which means placental tissue for most. If you have miscarried at home, saving the tissue in a clean jar and bringing it to your gyno can be suffi...

How healthy is my baby is the first questions parents ask. Many parents will first want to know what their chance of having a baby with Down's Syndrome , or a baby with any chromosome problem is. About 3% of all pregnancies have structural or genetic fetal abnormalities, and parents want to know how healthy their pregnancy is, as often the have important decisions to make. In fact the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists position is that "screening and invasive diagnostic testing for aneuploidy be offered to all pregnant women...regardless of maternal age." this however is not the way most gynos practice, and in fact not reflective of most insurance coverage which varies widely on what tests they will cover for an individual patient. The risks are greater as mom gets older. If we look at the risks in the whole population, if you are twenty years old and having a baby, then your risk is about 1/1600 of conceiving a baby with Trisomy 21 or Down's Synd...

The first reason to lose weight when pregnancy planning, if you are obese is that  obesity is associated with subfertility, as well as miscarriages. growth disorders for the fetus, birthing problems, diabetes and hypertension, just to name a few of the issues. You can find a lot about risk factors for birth defects on March of Dime s site, but you may have to ask your gyno about your overall fitness to become pregnant as obestity for one issue is not covered there. It is not known exactly why obese patients have trouble conceiving. Women who are obese and have polycystic ovarian disease (PCOS) are less likely to ovulate and conceive. But women who are obese without PCOS are also less likely to ovulate than the average person due to increased insulin resistance (your body not responding to insulin as normal women do), and that treating this will increase fertility.   Miscarriages also called Spontaneous abortions ( SAB) and recurrent SAB are also associa...

Now that you are pregnant there are a flurry of tests your gyno is going to want to get, and we think about testing our blood type and checking for anemia and infections, but hormone testing? Did we need to check those? During fertility treatments and with patients having early pregnancy problems it’s very common to check progesterone levels, and occasionally we do use estrogen level checks. But checking testosterone or other male hormone levels has been typically reserved for the woman who is having irregular cycles, extra hair growth, changes in sexual function or acne problems, and largely ignored once women get pregnant. A group of Stanford University research physicians working in their department of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility began to wonder about the birthing problems they saw in their most infertile patient population: patients getting in vitro fertilization (IVF). In these patients babies that had more stillbirths, and early infant deaths, more preterm deli...

One in four pregnancies are lost to miscarriage, and your gyno is going to need to know what type of miscarriage you had in order to recommend any treatment or follow up. If you have bleeding in early pregnancy, your pregnancy is very likely to be fine. Only about half (or fewer) of the pregnancies with early bleeding will go on to a pregnancy loss by 20 weeks of pregnancy. If you have had pregnancy confirmed, and you are bleeding, please contact your gyno so you can be checked. When you first come in to be checked early in pregnancy thinking you are having a miscarriage the question will be: how far pregnant are you, how many babies (twins?), what is the source of the bleeding, and if the pregnancy is still healthy. Some of our patients have bleeding and what has occurred in prior pregnancies is important, did you have an early miscarriage, or an evolving miscarriage, or a history of miscarriage. Prior to trying to get pregnant we spend time trying to discuss what did happen or wh...

The baby bed may not be ready when you go to have a baby. there are many issues: have you had a prior pregnancy, miscarriage, have been told you have an abnormal uterus or just unsure? When you are tying for pregnancy the obvious question is 'do I have a fertile uterus?' This might mean a normal shaped cavity, or the absence of any tumors like fibroid tumors, but the lining itself needs to be healthy for a embryo to implant and grow and form it's placenta. Trying to figure out if the uterus is ready for implantation of the embryo, should it manage all those negotiations of fertilization and leaving the fallopian tube, to finally show up to implant in the endometrium or lining tissue  has been tricky business. Pelvic examinations, pap smears and just the normal cycles of a woman can show that a lot is working well but they do not accurately predict the health of the uterine lining. We shed our lining each month, but stem cells from the base layer of the uterus regenerate ...

http://gynogab.blogspot.com/2009/07/fix-my-uterus-metroplasty.html Uterine shape is fairly typically the same from woman to woman. It is that classic, well, uterus shape, triangular on the inside, and described as egg shaped when considered as a whole. But women's wombs come in all sorts of sizes and shapes. These are known as uterine anomolies, and the most common are called bicornuate uterus but there are various combinations of doubling of the uterus that are seen. This change in shape is nothing you grow once you have a normal uterus, but it happens when you are a developing fetus, mostly because of failures of fusions from the lower segment  to the upper uterine segment, or a failure of fusion of the left to the right during fetal life. What is left may be a uterus shaped like a heart, or a double, or a half a heart. In rare cases there is no uterus at all. About 4% of the fertile population has such a uterus, and about 12% of the infertile population has these kind of...

The treatment called the Smith and Smith regimen treatment was universally used by gynecologists in it's day. Never heard of it? It sparked a generation of disaster. In 1949 the New England Journal of Medicine, a gynecologic paper advocated a radical new treatment that could prevent many pregnancy complications: miscarriages, preterm births to name the two most important. The paper described a regimen that came to be known as the "Smith and Smith" regimen which advocated the use of the estrogen, DES (diethylstibesterol). The regimen had become widespread as an off label treatment, and late in 1947 the FDA had actually granted Squibb an approval for the process. Twenty-three yeas later, in 1973, Dr. Arthur Herbst at the University of Chicago, described a vaginal cancer in a young women who had been exposed to this drug while being a fetus ( in utero) . And there is a DES registr y that has been going since the early 70s to track these rare vaginal cancers. They were ...

She's is the Queen. Literally. She was a queen, a queen of Great Britain and a queen of miscarriages. Well actually she was, Queen ascended to her throne in 1702, at the time she ruled England, Scotland and Ireland, and it was she who untied England and Scotland. Queen Ann's legacy was destined to be historical rather than genetic as her obstetrical history was very poor. We have never established what her medical problems was, perhaps a double uterus, uterine fibroids, infections, or something more complex such as antiphospholipid syndrome, but she never produced an heir although she had many pregnancies. Queen Anne of England had so many miscarriages she would have been labeled a habitual aborter in our time. We label those who have three or more miscarriages a habitual aborter. In truth, they are extremely common in fertile as well as those who never have a birth to term. Actually once you have 2 miscarriages your chance of miscarrying again is roughly 30%. 80% of miscarr...