Cells from babies help heal their mothers

[Dover]

Cells from babies help heal their mothers


09:30 08 November 04

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Pregnancy certainly has its downside, but it may have an unexpected upside as well: cells from the baby may help heal wounds in the mother, even long after it has been born.

It has been known for about a decade that cells from a human fetus can remain in its mother’s blood and bone marrow for many years. But what do they do?

Diana Bianchi at the Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston and her colleagues recently showed that these fetal cells can transform themselves into specialised cells in the thyroid, intestine, cervix and gall bladder. Now her team has shown that, in mice at least, these fetal cells also help heal skin wounds in the mother, both during and after pregnancy.

To make it easy to spot the fetal cells, the researchers mated normal females with males whose cells had been genetically engineered to glow when the gene for VEGFR2, a blood vessel growth factor, is switched on. The fetal cells would thus glow too if involved in blood vessel formation in growing or healing tissues....

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996610

[DemExpat]

1. The old wive's tale of "for every baby a tooth"

is one I never bought into, personally....maybe if a woman bears 10+ kids...:eyes:

I felt that going through the processes of pregnancy and breastfeeding (twice) did so very much for my physical and mental health.
I also did not experience pregnancy as having a "parasite" sucking the life out of me as some women seem to - it felt good, it felt right, it felt like the "machinery" was being put to good use...lol...

But did not do too much for my figure, though.... :D

Interesting article!

DemEx