Both are healthy, both want children, do everything they can for this, but … Here she is – the reason. It was buried deep, but you can’t hide from real scientists.
– Well, when you are already ripe for a baby? – this question invariably drives Andrey and Lena out of themselves.
“I don’t understand,” the girl drops her hands wearily. – We passed all the doctors, we are all right. But I’m not getting pregnant. I do not know why. And nobody knows.
Friends mutter comforting words that, they say, all this is psychology and just the right moment has not come. Or maybe just a man is not suitable?
However, American scientists seem to have managed to find an explanation for such anomalies. A group of researchers from New York believes that it is all about a specific gene mutation. In an article published in Scientific Reports, they explain that the root of all troubles lies in the DNA chain. Specifically, in the NLRP2 gene.
If a woman does not have this gene, then there is a problem: she cannot become pregnant, or the pregnancy ends in miscarriage, sometimes at the stage when the embryo has not yet attached. Other deviations also occur: abnormal development of the placenta, for example. And if you still manage to get pregnant and bear a child, then there is a very high probability that the baby will be born with deviations.
– Women who have this mutation are healthy in all other physical aspects. Therefore, they do not know that they have these mutations, and it is because of them that they cannot become mothers, says Sangeeta Mahadevan, head of the study, a doctor at Baylor Medicine College.
The scientists made their conclusions based on experiments carried out on mice. Not a single female with a DNA mutation in the NLRP gene has been able to produce healthy offspring. Moreover, when researchers tried to artificially grow an embryo from a mutant mouse egg, it simply did not develop.
– Even IVF will not help such women. They are genetically incapable of carrying offspring, admits Dr. Mahadevan.
If these disappointing conclusions are confirmed with further experiments, scientists will have a new challenge: how to correct this mutation in order to give every woman the opportunity to give birth to a child.