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Bodies are endlessly fascinating in how they are able to regulate, restore, prepare, generate, and create.

Female bodies are especially amazing because, you know, the magic of birth.

The fact that a female can make another human being inside of her own body is pure sorcery.

During birth, there are two bodies doing extraordinary things, from the visible level to the invisible – which makes knowing more about the nuances quite the challenge for doctors and scientists.

The timing of labour is especially complicated.

It’s always been tough to pin down exactly when a pregnant woman might go into labour, but now there is a study that has provided a blood test that narrows the predicted delivery time down to a two-week window.

Researchers expect that with a little refinement, it will become even more precise.

Labour has always been predicted by doctors checking the baby’s growth using ultrasound and determining when the little person might be ready to meet the world, but the other body involved, the mother, might not be as ready.

Here’s Dr Brice Gaudilliere, the study’s senior author and associate professor of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine, via The Telegraph:

“Clinicians are good at estimating gestational age, which measures the development of the foetus,” she said.

“But there is a disconnect between this timing and when labour starts, because whether the baby is ready is only one factor in the onset of labour. The other part of the equation is the mother.”

For now, all that pregnant women are given is a rough due date, based on counting 40 weeks from the first day of the last menstrual cycle, but many babies often come two or three weeks later anyway.

Now scientists at Stanford University have discovered that there’s the possibility of a blood test that can detect when the body enters a pre-labour phase around three weeks before the birth, allowing a more accurate prediction of when a pregnant woman will go into labour.

The blood test, which could be available within three years, can spot several signs of labour in the blood:

“The mom’s body and physiology start to change about three weeks before the actual onset of labour,” said co-author Dr Virginia Winn, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford.

“It’s not a single switch; there’s this preparation that the body has to go through.”

Scientists discovered that pregnant women begin producing more clotting factors as they prepare for delivery, which helps stop blood loss after birth.

What’s more, blood vessel formation decreases as the connection between the placenta and the womb weakens.

An increase in pregnancy and stress hormones, progesterone, and cortisol respectively, as well as a rise in placental proteins and proteins that prevent inflammation, can also be detected during the preparatory time.

“If we understand what’s regulating labour, we might be able to do a better job of inducing labour,” adds Dr Winn.

The finding of the anti-inflammatory protein was of particular interest to scientists as they hypothesised that labour is an inflammatory reaction:

“…There are signs of that, but we also found that aspects of this inflammation are toned down before labour starts, which we think may prepare the mother’s immune system for the next phase, when the baby is born and healing and immune resolution begins,” added Dr Gaudilliere.

“It needs to be a regulated process.”

The research was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, and followed 63 women through the last 100 days of their pregnancies.

Truly remarkable.

[source:thetelegraph]