New Israeli comprehensive study examines massive physiological load of childbirth

Jerusalem Post - 06/04
During pregnancy, the mother’s cardiovascular, respiratory, renal, gastrointestinal, skeletal, metabolic, endocrine, and immune systems are all affected by fetal demand.

If you ask any pregnant woman if she felt differently before she conceived and after giving birth, she will concur immediately. It’s well known that pregnancy and delivery dramatically affect virtually all systems of the woman’s body, but until now, these changes have, surprisingly, not been systematically analyzed over time in a large human population.

Now, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot have accomplished this with 76 lab tests based on a cross-sectional analysis of 44 million measurements from over 300,000 pregnancies that included about half of the pregnancies in Israel between the years 2003 and 2020.

The data, obtained using the large database of Clalit Health Services (the country’s largest health fund, covering 55% of the Israeli population), prov...
[Short citation of 8% of the original article]