If you are a pregnant woman, there is a 7 out of 10 chances that you have experienced morning sickness and this is because 7 out of 10 pregnant women experience it but one question I still ask myself is why people refer to it at morning sickness when it can happen at any time of the day. Scientists have been able to find the culprit for this sickness which is known as Nausea and Vomiting of Pregnancy (NVP) which we refer to as Morning Sickness, then we can find a way to solve the problem.
Nausea and Vomiting of Pregnancy (NVP) usually happens in the first trimester of pregnancy but it can differ in some people where they might have to vomit all through the day for the entire 9 months with some of them having a temporary bed in the hospital until they put to bed and this condition is known as Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG) and it affects less than 3% of pregnant moms and they have to get intravenous fluid so as to replace the lost nutrients after continuous non-stop vomiting.
In other to relief women of these misery, scientists have been looking for solutions such as in the 1950s when Thalidomide were prescribed to women. While the drug did a good job in stopping the vomiting and nausea, it came with a side effect which was deformity in the children being born. This doesn't mean that anti-nausea medications are not safe because today we have safe anti-nausea medications. This medications will only affect the symptom which is the nausea and vomiting but not treat the problem, so to be able to treat the problem, we need to understand why it is happening in the first place.
In the past, a lot of hypothesis were raised in the quest to finding a solution to the problem such as pregnant women were just extra sensitive to smell and taste, leading them becoming repulsive to food that themselves or the babies do not need. This hypothesis after all didn't confirm the claim so scientists looked at the genetics and biology of nauseating and non-nauseating pregnant people to be able to get an answer.
Scientists then hypothesized that elevated level of Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG) was to be blamed for the nauseated but the results for this claim weren't conclusive and data didn't support it and now scientists have looked into another cause and this time around, it is Growth Differentiation Factor 15 (GDF15).
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This cytokine hormone is present in everyone's body and is a part of a natural response to stress and it can increase depending on the type of stress the body is going through. Growth Differentiation Factor 15 (GDF15) does its job by binding to specific types of receptor in the brain leading to nausea and vomiting. Scientist noticed that people tend to have increased GDF15 during pregnancy and they could only look at a correlation between the hormone and the condition but in 2018, a study was published and it showed that there was a genetic correlation to having high GDF15 level and pregnancy.
To confirm this, another study was done in 2022 where the genome of over 1500 pregnant mom were investigated and over 900 of the pregnant mothers were treated for Hyperemesis Gravidarum while the rest had normal Nausea and Vomiting of Pregnancy symptoms or non at all. The researchers found that there were mutated genes which coded for GDF15 that were associated with women that had severe Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG) condition. This led to the conclusion that GDF15 played a vital role in Hyperemesis Gravidarum and NVP.
A journal in 2023 suggested that women would have low GDF15 before pregnancy but this tends to rise when the placenta and the mother both produces the hormone which then leads to severe nausea and vomiting. To test the hypothesis, mice were injected with a placebo or a medium amount of GDF15 hormone. The both group of mice were doing fine and three days later the researchers injected both group with a high amount of GDF15 and realized that the mice that were given placebo ate less, lost weight, and experienced nausea while the ones that had been injected with a medium amount of GDF15 before didn't have any problems.
Asides from the mice, they also observed pregnant women and noticed that if the fetus releases little amount of GDF15, they were less likely to experience nausea and vomiting, and women who had high amount of GDF15 before pregnancy were less likely to experience nausea and vomiting when they get pregnant. Now we know that the reason why pregnant women experience Nausea and Vomiting of Pregnancy (NVP) is because the GDF15 in their body went from extremely low to extremely high level.
Now, scientists are looking into how they can find a solution to how GDF15 interacts with the brain so as to prevent nausea and vomiting. The hormone cannot be stopped especially from the fetus because it is important in making the baby safe from the mother's immune system that could attack the baby as foreign.
Read More
- https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=morning-sickness-1-2080
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9779231/
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06921-9
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8085570/
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03258-0
- https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/12232-hyperemesis-gravidarum
- https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2023.41.16_suppl.TPS12147
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1550413119306692
- https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1471-0528.17129
- https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2553283
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0002937802800175
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8785858/
- https://www.ukri.org/news/study-finds-cause-and-potential-prevention-for-pregnancy-sickness/
