Sudden nausea, and then a quick run to a nearby bathroom: the pregnant woman is well aware of the pain of morning sickness.
Now, British researchers believe they have found the root cause of the disease and perhaps a new way to prevent it.
Morning sickness may be related to a hormone secreted by the fetus, called GDF15, which may act on the brains of the mother-to-be, causing her to feel nauseous and vomiting.
Exposing women to GDF15 before pregnancy may build a tolerance so that morning sickness doesn't become a problem, the researchers said. This is what a team of international researchers asserts.
Most pregnant women experience symptoms of nausea and vomiting at some stage, and while this is not a pleasant thing, for some women, the symptoms can be more severe – they can become so uncomfortable that they need to **, or even need to be hospitalized," said the study's lead author, Stephen O, from the University of Cambridge in the UK'Dr. Rahilly said.
Now we know why: The fetus in the womb produces hormone levels that the mother doesn't normally have," Mr. Olasiri said in a university news release.
He directs the Institute for Metabolic Diseases, Cambridge Medical Research Council.
O'Rahilly explains that the more sensitive a woman is to fetal GDF15, "the worse she will be." ”。
Knowing this, we can take some inspiration from this and think about how to prevent this from happening," he said. "It also gives us more confidence that blocking GDF15 from entering specific receptors in the maternal brain will eventually lead to an effective and safe way to ** the disease." ”
This has already been hinted at in mouse studies. In those studies, mice exposed to high GDF15 levels stopped eating, suggesting they felt nauseous. However, this did not happen for mice that had previously been gradually exposed to this hormone and had established tolerances.
Dr. Marlena Fejzo, a co-author of the USC study, conducted the study with first-hand knowledge.
When I was pregnant, I became so weak that I could barely move if I didn't throw up," she said at a press conference at the University of Cambridge. "As I tried to find out why, I realized that although morning sickness was very common, very little was known about my condition. Fejzo is a researcher in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences at the University of Southern California.
In a new analysis published Dec. 13 in the journal Nature, Fejzo, O'Rahilly and colleagues looked at data from multiple genetic and hormonal studies conducted by pregnant women in cells, mice and humans.
This study helps to determine that fetal GDF15 is the cause of hyperemesis gravidarum (severe morning sickness, medical term).
They point out that this hormone is made by all tissues of the body at extremely low levels. However, some women are more sensitive to fetal GDF15 than others.
Researchers say women with certain genetic variants may be more sensitive to GDF15 and thus have more severe symptoms of morning sickness.
On the other hand, women with the inherited blood disorder Beta thalassemia have been exposed to higher levels of GD515, so they rarely experience morning sickness.
Charlotte Holdern, who lives in the UK, said her morning sickness was getting worse until she couldn't eat anything and threw up more than 30 times a day.
When you have a disease and no one can tell you why, you start thinking, 'Is it me?'Did I do something?She said at a Cambridge press conference.
Horgan said she was grateful for the new findings, "because it's not an area of research that people are really interested in." It's just morning sickness, why should we care?”
More information. Visit the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists for more information on morning sickness.
*: University of Cambridge press release, 13 December 2023.
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