Episode Details

The placenta is critically important for the success of a pregnancy, being the physical connection between the mother's body and the developing fetus. Defects in the placenta tend to have significant consequences for the pregnancy and the fetus, including things like preeclampsia, preterm birth and maybe also congenital heart defects. So understanding what's going on in the placenta before these conditions develop has enormous potential to drastically improve the health of the fetus and future child. But figuring out that a problem is a foot before physical signs of that problem show themselves in the form of preterm contractions or high blood pressure in pregnancy has been a challenge. Today I'm talking to a researcher I'm describing as the Magellen of pregnancy, an explorer of sorts showing us new details of changes in inflammation during pregnancies in progress that we haven't been able to see before by adapting a specific type of MRI to image inflammation in the placenta in real time.

To read the paper, you can find it here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11698687/