Hip Check

Should everyone be measured?
I don't think that will be necessary. I should think they'd be much more likely to take a blood test to measure hormones in the first months of pregnancy.

Did you stumble onto hip size simply because the measurements were there?
Yes. I'm afraid that's exactly that. It's just serendipity. We have been doing these studies over 12 years to look at how the size of the baby at birth affects its health, which it does a lot. Just one day we realized that we had all these measurements of the mother, and we got interested in that.

Is there anything else you'd like people to know?
The other thing the paper raises is the risk of breast cancer is highest among the women who stayed  on in the womb past 40 weeks.

Should women whose pregnancies go past 40 weeks get C-sections?
We need more work. It's too soon to say that. [But] that's an issue the article definitely raises. The placenta once it's formed is a barrier between the mother and the baby. It's a protective barrier. Toward the end of pregnancy, the placenta starts to die. Its barrier function weakens. If you linger on in the womb, you may start to see circulating hormones in the mother's blood pass across the placenta and go to the baby.

There's nothing mom can do to shrink her hips or estrogen levels?
No. The hip thing is only a marker. It's like your height. Once you figure out how that is actually linked into hormone levels, there would be a lot of things we could do. We've fixed a lot of hormonal diseases. We've fixed thyroid disease.

It's more to identify who we should watch?
Yes. It's about protecting the vulnerable.

© 2007