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We’ve all heard the stat: As many as one in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage. But despite how common miscarriage is, it hurts like hell when it happens. It did for me, anyway. I lost a baby at 13 weeks?it had died at 9 weeks, but I only found out a month later, when I started bleeding?and the experience is easily the hardest thing I’ve ever been through in my life.
But I only had one miscarriage. Lots of women have multiple miscarriages, which I can imagine would be almost unbearable. That’s why it’s really exciting to hear that researchers at the University of Warwick in the UK think they’ve figured out the reason why some multiple miscarriages happen?which, hopefully, could lead to the discovery of a method of preventing it in the first place. The scientists believe that a lack of stem cells in the womb lining could be cause of recurrent miscarriages (defined as the loss of three or more consecutive pregnancies). For their study, which was published in a recent issue of the journal Stem Cells, they looked at the womb linings of 183 women who had experienced multiple losses and found that they were missing an “epigenetic signature”?something that signals the presence of stem cells. “We have discovered that the lining of the womb in the recurrent miscarriage patients we studied is already defective before pregnancy,” says lead study author Jan Brosens. (Personally, I think the use of th...