Amy Boddy

But long-term, there could be some trade-offs where actually at some point it can lead to health complications.

Typically, your body recognizes self by specific markers on your cell that says, you know, like, hey, I am me.

So maybe, for example, they're expressing a protein you've never seen before.

Then your immune system might say, hey, that's not self.

We need to go ahead and get rid of this.

And that can

You know, elicit an autoimmune response.

I don't know if we can call it autoimmune because that means self, right?

There's a few different studies looking at individuals with autoimmune disease and they find these fetal cells in the tissue.

We don't know the root cause.

We don't know if these individuals would have gone on to get autoimmune diseases anyways, and the cells, again, just happen to be there.

And some women had higher amounts of fetal cells in their body and were diagnosed with cancer.

But then there's other papers.

This is where it gets really confusing.

There's other studies showing that

No, actually, those cells might be in there trying to help fight the cancer.

And actually, these cells are protective.

And so it's a big like, we don't know what they're doing.

Are they fighting the tumor?

Are they making, you know, the immune system more aggressive in making this cancer worse?