I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Organs Zone. It has scientists studying health and disease in various parts of our bodies. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
That’s a hard one, and it’s not my field. Hannah probably has a better answer for you! But there are lots of reasons why it can be difficult for some women to have children. Some of those reasons can be genetic (the code is broken in some way, so that it doesn’t combine properly), physical, hormonal (things like diabetes and thyroid disease can make it harder), and sometimes environmental (toxins in the air or water can cause fertility problems). And sometimes it can be a problem on the side of the father. Once you start looking at how difficult it really is for a baby to actually be conceived and born, you realize that it’s amazing that human beings have ever survived!
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Thats definitely my kind of question! Thats what i work on every day!!
Well these days, there are lots of things that make it difficult to get pregnant. The biggest problems for people trying to get pregnant are age and obesity.
When women get older, the quality of their eggs gets lower, so it becomes harder to conceive. And people are waiting longer to have babies, which means that more people will have difficulties.
The other biggest problem is obesity. We don’t understand all the reasons why just yet, but we know that if a woman is overweight or obese that it is much more difficult to conceive a baby and that they are likely to have more problems during pregnancy, like high blood pressure.
The best way to insure you don’t have problems getting pregnant is to take good care of yourself and to try and get pregnant before you are 37.
Carina is right that there’s actually lots and lots of things that might make it difficult to have a baby, but age and obesity are by far the most common in Australia. But she’s right, theres certainly genetic (DNA) reasons and environmental reasons (like some pesticides for example). But if you take good care of yourself, it’s not something that you should worry about 🙂
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Something I learnt last week is that while we know that age is important for women when it comes to having a baby, its also important for men too.
When a cell divides, the DNA double strands separate to allow another copy to be made. During this process, DNA can break and move around and the new copy of DNA is no longer identical to the original one — this is called a mutation. Mutations in DNA can make a new genetic code.
As we get older, mutations happen more often. A baby girl is born with all the eggs she will ever need later in life and the DNA in her eggs is safe from mutations that could occur when she is older. On the other hand, men make new sperm through out their lives. Sperm divide every 16 days, so that’s a lot of new sperm, all the time. Sperm from older men contain more DNA mutations. Scientists looking at Autism have found a pattern; older fathers are more likely to have children who later develop autism. Could more DNA mutations be linked to Autism? This is only a pattern and we are watching this space to see if more patterns are found.
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Very well answered by Hannah and the other ladies.
What you need to understand too brettles is that everyone is different. Accordingly, our bodies are different. So one thing that’s normal for one of us, is not normal for another.
There are a lot of factors that can affect the fertility of women (how able you are to have a child); as mentioned in the other posts 🙂
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