Breakthrough for repeated miscarriage

One in five pregnancies miscarry.  A miscarriage is a traumatic experience for any woman to go through, but multiple miscarriages is heart breaking.  In some cases this can be caused as one of the couple carry an abnormality of their chromosomes, called a translocation.  We should have 23 pairs of chromosomes in a particular order but in some individuals they carry a balanced translocation.  This is where two of the chromosomes have broken and stuck together incorrectly.  Carrying a balanced translocation usually means you do not have an abnormality but you are at risk of transmitting unbalanced chromosomes to your offspring, which could lead to repeated miscarriages or abnormalities in your children.

But some women have repeated miscarriages when their chromosomes are normal.  Scientists at Warwick University have found that some women with repeated miscarriage have stem cell deficiency and accelerated stromal senescence which “limits the differentiation capacity of the endometrium and predispose for pregnancy failure”.   In lay terms this means that some women have a reduced number of stem cells in the womb lining which is causing repeated miscarriage.

The Warwick team are working on treatment for the lack of stem cells.

Talking to The Guardian – Professor Jan Brosens said: “We have discovered that the lining of the womb in the recurrent miscarriage patients we studied is already defective before pregnancy.  I can envisage that we will be able to correct these defects before the patient tries to achieve another pregnancy. In fact, this may be the only way to really prevent miscarriages in these cases.”

Professor Siobhan Quenby told The Guardian that the real challenge now was to develop strategies to increase the function of stem cells in the womb lining and that new interventions to improve the lining of the womb would be piloted in the spring of 2016.  “Our focus will be two-fold. First, we wish to improve the screening of women at risk of recurrent miscarriage by developing new endometrial tests.  Second, there are a number of drugs and other interventions, such as endometrial ‘scratch’, a procedure used to help embryos implant more successfully, that have the potential to increase the stem cell populations in the womb lining.”

Read More:

Loss of Endometrial Plasticity in Recurrent Pregnancy Loss

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/mar/08/scientists-identify-cause-of-multiple-miscarriages-for-first-time?CMP=fb_gu