Alice Klein

speaker

164 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 16 Sep

Alice Klein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The World, the Universe and Us · The Mystery of Childbirth Is Finally Being Unravelled · 16 Sep 2026 podcast

And in line with this, the researchers found that levels of ATP, the energy providing molecule, that increase in the muscle cells after they receive the mitochondria from the immune cells.

Well, so here's another really interesting thing.

The influx of mitochondria also increased levels of an enzyme that breaks down progesterone.

this drop in progesterone is probably what actually signals the onset of labor in humans.

Because as we discussed before, it's known that a sharp drop in progesterone is what turns on the genes needed for labor.

And in other animals, progesterone drops all over the body.

But maybe in humans, we've got this really precise, elegant mechanism where progesterone is just dropping in the muscle cells of the uterus.

And that's what kicks off the contractions.

Well, the first thing is that if we can understand what triggers labour, then we might be able to stop it when it happens too early, as in the case of preterm births.

Yes, and they are called tocolytics, and they work by relaxing the uterus so that it doesn't contract.

But they tend to only delay labor for a short time, maybe up to a few days.

So, for example, a few years ago when my husband was working for the Flying Doctor Service in Australia, he needed to transfer a woman who was pregnant with twins from the country to the nearest city because she started going to labor at just 24 weeks, I think.

Wow.

And so she needed to get to a hospital with neonatal intensive care.

And she'd already been given these tocolytics to try to halt the labor.

But as you can imagine, he was absolutely sweating because he was worried that they would wear off mid-flight and he'd have to deliver these tumors.

two very preemie babies on a tiny plane.

But fortunately they did manage to get her to the hospital without her going to labor and her babies were okay.

But yeah, if we had drugs that could, you know, delay labor reliably for much longer, that would be, that would be great.

flying

Showing 41–60 of 164 · page 3 of 9