Latest news with #ChasingLife
CNN
2 days ago
- Health
- CNN
What Your Sweat Could Reveal About Your Health - Chasing Life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta - Podcast on CNN Audio
Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:00:00 Welcome to Chasing Life and welcome to Summertime. You know, it's that time of year. Barbecues, baseball games, the beach, lounging by the pool, maybe lounging by the lake like we do in my home state of Michigan. I love summertime. But you know, summertime also means heat and for our bodies, that means sweat. We all sweat every day. Some of us more than others, yes, but nothing to be ashamed of. You certainly know that sweat is our body's natural cooling system. There's been all this research recently telling us that sweat can do a lot more than just turn down our body's temperature. Each droplet of sweat could be full of signs and signals about what's going on deep inside our bodies. Sweat could be the key to understanding not only our hydration, but also our nutrient levels, our kidney health. Sweat is a lot fascinating than you probably ever realized. And today I'm sitting down one of the scientists who's leading that research. His name is Professor John Rogers, and he is director of Northwestern's Querry Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics. He is an expert on sweat, and he's gonna talk me through the basics of sweat, but also its potential, and help me understand how sweat could save a lot of lives and help us all perform at our very best. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, and this is Chasing Life. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:01:37 First of all, just some terms. What is sweat? John Rogers 00:01:40 So sweat is a fluid created by glands that exist about a millimeter below the surface of the skin. These glands connect to ducts that transport sweat generated by the glands to the surface of the skin. The density of sweat glands is highest on the fingertips about 400 glands per square centimeter. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:02:01 On your fingertips? I didn't realize that. John Rogers 00:02:04 Yeah, if you look at the sort of the magnified view of your fingertips, the sweat pores exist on the upper surfaces of the ridges of the texture of the skin of the fingertips. So quite a lot of sweat will come out of your finger tips. You get sweaty palms, you know, you feel nervous or something like that, you're exercising. But you have also sweat glands distributed across your entire body, obviously not just your fingertips. So there's pretty high density of sweat glands in your forehead. About a hundred and fifty sweat glands per square centimeter on your forearms uh... Maybe half of that on your back and your your abdomen that kind of thing so there are two classes of sweat glands one is called eccrine sweat glands uh... And those are the ones that i just referred to. There are other sweat glands that a little bit different and they involve a more complex chemistry associated with the sweat those are that apocrine glands they exist the armpits the genital regions and so on. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:02:59 Most people hear sweat and they think... I get hot, I sweat. That helps my body cool down. Is that the primary reason we sweat? John Rogers 00:03:07 Primarily, that is the reason for thermal regulation, so maintaining thermal homeostasis. So sweating is triggered when the core body temperature rises above a certain threshold, and then the rate of sweating is determined by the external temperature and humidity level and so on. But sweating can also be induced by nervousness. There are sort of emotional cues that will cause a sweating. You're really nervous in an interview, you will start to sweat. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:03:35 Are you sweating now? John Rogers 00:03:36 Not yet, yeah. We'll see how it goes. And there are different kinds of foods that you can eat, right, that will cause sweat. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:03:43 So you mentioned three reasons that we sweat to cool the body when we may be nervous and maybe in response to certain foods. Is the sweat different depending on what the stimulus for the sweat? John Rogers 00:03:56 It's more or less the same, although the chemical composition of sweat can depend on sweat rate and the total volume of sweat that's been lost. So if you sweat very quickly, for example, at a high rate of sweating, the chloride concentration can be higher than its slow rates of sweating. So there are some dependencies there on the rate and the amount of sweat has been lost, but not so much on the mechanism by which the sweat is induced. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:04:25 Is your sweat fundamentally going to be similar to my sweat? Is there variation from human to human? John Rogers 00:04:31 So there's quite a large variation in the electrolyte level in sweat, and that's just genetically determined. It can be modulated by that, but there's sort of genetic baseline that determines your kind of average electrolyte levels. But it can be modulated by dietary habits, it can modulated be the amount of exercise you're doing, your fitness levels, that kind of thing. But for more basic biochemical species, let's say creatinine and urea, which we'll talk about in a little bit in the context of kidney health. That tends, what we're seeing in the data is that those two biochemicals species in sweat correlate very nicely with the same species in blood. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:05:15 Now I do want to take a moment here and explain a couple things. First of all, the reason sweat carries the same biomarkers as blood is because they have something in common: interstitial fluid. Interstitial fluid comes from blood as it's traveling through small blood vessels or capillaries. It's found throughout the body and its main function is to transport oxygen and other nutrients to cells and also remove waste from cells. But here's the thing: When sweat glands are activated, they are pulling from that same interstitial fluid, which then diffuses across layers of skin to become sweat. The second thing you're gonna hear us talk a lot about the concept of correlation. Specifically, whether or not certain levels of biomarkers detected in sweat could have the same medical significance if found in blood. When I went to the doctor, I got my blood drawn and everything, they're measuring basic chemistries, my sodium, my potassium, chloride, things like that. They might also measure my cholesterol and lipids and things like that. What can sweat measure? John Rogers 00:06:21 So for the things that we're looking at specifically, it's electrolyte level, electrolyte replenishment becomes very important for athletes, for workers in oil and gas manufacturing, construction, that kind of thing. Chloride for cystic fibrosis diagnostics, we published on that and we've done studies on large cohorts of infants. Kidney health is one that we think is really, really interesting. Looking at creatinine and urea concentrations in sweat, as I mentioned. We're also very interested in sweat, the nutritional biomarkers that are in sweat. So we have assays for vitamin D9, vitamin C, calcium, zinc, and iron. And we're in the process of establishing whether those species in sweat also correlate with species in blood. That's ongoing work. But I think that would be very powerful because you would be able to assess nutritional balance very quickly, right? And I think especially in lower and middle income countries. Nutritional deficiencies in pediatric patients can cause health challenges throughout an individual's life. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:07:24 We're going to take a quick break here, but when we come back, I'm in the hot seat. John Rogers 00:07:28 Take a look and see if you've started sweating. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:07:32 They say to never let them see you sweat, well for me, that's about to change. Last year I decided to go pay Professor John Rogers a visit at his lab at Northwestern. John Rogers 00:07:46 All right, welcome to our testing facility. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:07:49 He had one goal for me. John Rogers 00:07:50 So we have a portable sauna here. It's going to replicate the environment that you would. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:07:54 And that's right, in the lab was a portable sauna. Picture of this small tent where your entire body is zipped in, except for your head. And then the temperature inside that tent is cranked up to a cozy about 135 degrees Fahrenheit. And the whole point is to get me to sweat, which you can probably see that I'm starting to do, having been in here for about 15 minutes. Now, while I was in the sauna, Professor Rogers had me wear this small patch that he and his team had designed. This patch sticks straight onto your skin. And then on the backside there are these reservoir channels. If you're looking at it, it basically looks like a semiconductor. Now when a person sweats, or in this case when I sweat, the channels fill with that sweat and turns the patch different colors to correlate with different levels of biomarkers in your body. What is interesting though, is that they're basically trying to measure sweat on my arms here. And you can tell on this one, for example, that I've started to sweat. You can see some sweat on my arm. This is measuring all these different things, ketones, chloride, All these things that you'd normally get tested with a blood draw by sticking a needle in your arm. Now, you don't need to be in... John Rogers 00:09:07 Let's take a look and see if. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:09:09 I'm starting to feel it a little bit, about 12 minutes. John Rogers 00:09:13 Not much yet on that side, why don't we check the other device. So it's started to fill. There's chloride assays over here, so you're seeing a slight pink color, which means probably chloride concentration around 10 millimolar, 15, something that range. Great job. Thank you. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:09:30 I sat here and did nothing, literally. John Rogers 00:09:32 Yeah, yeah. Well, your sweat glands did something. They're working. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:09:39 Finding a way to actually collect the sweat, that has been the key in studying it. You know, I think it's sort of fascinating. I remember thinking this before I met you, but then sort of reflecting on it afterwards, this idea that we study blood, we have all sorts of different ways of imaging the body. Why weren't we studying sweat all along? It seems like an easy one to sort of study. John Rogers 00:10:05 I think probably the reason why it hasn't sort of taken off earlier is it's just difficult to collect pristine uncontaminated volumes of sweat. In the early days, you'd use like a device to kind of scrape along the surface of the skin, sort of collect enough sweat that you can get it into a pipette or a syringe or a vial or something like that. The other way to do it is you have like an absorbent pad and a layer of tape on top of it and you kind of put it down and then you peel it off bring the sweat out of the pad, but kind of clumsy approaches overall. So I think that was kind of a missing element, kind of an engineering mechanism for collecting volumes of sweat in a very reliable, reproducible way. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:10:48 'Was it just the, as you call it, the clumsiness that led to this sort of being under-studied, or do you think there was just so much inertia around blood and urine and things like that? John Rogers 00:11:00 'Well, probably a combination of both. I do think there was sort of this missing capacity for collecting tiny volumes of sweat and manipulating those. There's no question that that did not exist prior to maybe 2016 or so. So that was definitely a shift. The other thing may be a broader societal change where there's a greater and greater appreciation of sort of continuous health monitoring using non-invasive sort of wearable devices, you know, whether that's a you know, a watch type device that goes on your wrist or something that goes on your finger or what we've been interested in, sort of soft skin adherent patches, essentially, be placed on anatomically relevant locations of the body for measuring different conditions associated with patient care. And so maybe in that context, it just makes a lot more sense to think about sweat and the ability to kind of capture that biochemical information and sort of a continuous wearable sort of platform. You put it on, sweat enters in. The color develops, you take a smartphone camera, you snap a picture of the device, it does automated color extraction, and the color then calibrates to a specific concentration of those species. So that's the way our devices work. Very simple, sort of single use device construction is the way we have it set up. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:12:21 So it's not a binary thing because it's not just color changing. You're actually then quantifying what that color means it sounds like. John Rogers 00:12:28 Yeah, that's right. The vibrancy of that color, the depth of that color correlates directly to a specific concentration level in a continuous manner. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:12:38 Is the real secret sauce here, this figuring out of the microfluidics, is that what you're alluding to? Yeah. John Rogers 00:12:44 Yeah, from an engineering standpoint, that's it. But as you've pointed out, really establishing through sort of medical research, what are the correlations between sweat chemistry and blood chemistry? And that's a little bit kind of outside of the domain of the microfluidic device itself, because you can in principle study those correlations with any kind of collection vehicle. I think the microfluentics allows that kind of reproducibility and precision in collecting pristine volumes of samples. Of sweat, but that's more kind of in a biology domain, figuring out those correlations. But then the engineering piece, I think it's already in place. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:13:18 Well, so when it comes to sweat, then where do you think this is going to go? I mean, are you going to get better if you look at lots and lots of data, for example, blood data and sweat data, and you have these huge machine learning models now, will we get better correlating sweat with blood so that sweat becomes more meaningful? Where is this heading,? John Rogers 00:13:42 Well, that's a great point. I would say, you know, this kind of machine learning models are gonna be important in really getting a very deep understanding of one's health condition from a combination of biophysical sensor outputs, as well as some of this biochemical information that we're capturing through sweat. And you collect it all together. I think it's gonna be a really powerful opportunity. So I think is a really exciting area for the future. The other thing is a lot of these species just correlate in a very natural way. It doesn't really even require machine learning. Like creatinine and urea we were just talking about, caffeine, alcohol. I think what we will find, we haven't completely proven this, there are a lot micronutrients in sweat. Vitamin C, for example, a number of different essential minerals for a healthy diet appear in sweat as well. We're very interested in pediatric health in that context. You put on a patch, you do kind of almost a full panel analysis of species relevant to a healthy nutrition. But I think there are enough reasons to be interested in sweat, again, biased perspective, that we're plenty motivated. We're gonna continue no matter what. And I think it's a great discovery area in terms of the biology. And there are some immediate applications here that don't even require these correlations to be established. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:14:56 What about lipids? Could lipids potentially be measured through sweat like cholesterol or triglycerides or triglycerides? John Rogers 00:15:01 That's a good question. We're hoping for cholesterol. We haven't found substantial amounts of it. Cortisol is an interesting one, and we just submitted a new paper on sweat cortisol. As you mentioned, there's a correlation there. The concentrations are super low. I mean, some of the challenge just is related to the very minute concentrations of some of these. More of a kind of an engineering challenge, I guess. Sweat's 99% water. It's only 1% of all of these different chemicals, you know, collected together, so they're very minute in terms of their presence. But amino acids are there, we can capture those. I think it's a really interesting discovery space, like we started talking about. There just hasn't been a lot of work on sweat, but I think a lot of the pieces are there and we're pretty excited about it. John Rogers 00:15:50 So how has it been going? Are people using it for these purposes? John Rogers 00:15:56 'Well, so great question. So full disclosure, I'm involved in a startup company that has kind of spun out of the academic work that we do kind of in our university lab environment here. I don't have any day-to-day role. I don't have a consulting relationship, anything like that, but I am the board. So it's good to kind of disclose that. But the company is called Epicore Biosystems. And so they have a couple of large sort of customers and business relationships in sports and athletics. And in worker safety. So in those cases, you don't have to worry about correlations to blood because you're tracking sweat loss as a mechanism for determining how much water you've lost as a result of an athletic competition, a training, or if you're in the oil and gas industry, you're working in a hot human environment, you're just sweating. And it also measures electrolyte loss via that same mechanism. And that's important for sports performance because it's well known that poor hydration can lead to cramping and injury and decreased levels of performance. And so the idea is these devices can provide a precise way to determine how much body water you've lost as a result of sweating. And you can use that information to hydrate at appropriate levels. So avoid over hydrating or under hydrating. And by similar token, you can determine how much electrolyte supplement salt tablets you need to take in order to get back to where you were before you lost electrolytes by sweating. And so they have a joint product offering with Gatorade. I don't want to pitch products, but you ask. And so I think they've done about 3 million of these Gatorade, GX patches and There's an app that goes along with the patch. It works exactly the same way that I was just describing. It's a sticker, you put it on, you know, and the channels fill with sweat. You can determine the extent of filling, and then there's a colorimetric reagent. In this case, it responds to chloride concentration, which is pretty much electrostatically balanced with sodium, so it's a good indicator of overall electrolyte concentration. And with the electrolyte consideration, you determine electrolyte loss. And so that guides replenishment. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:18:09 But if I wanted to buy one, could I buy one? John Rogers 00:18:11 Yeah, you can buy them at Dick's Sporting Goods. You can order them off of the Gatorade website. They're bundled in many cases with the GX bottles and the pods and that whole thing. So I think they're about $10 for a pack of two kind of in that. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:18:27 Well, you know, I just got to say again, when I first heard about your work, it made so much intuitive sense to me that you have sweat as a biofluid, from which we can learn a lot of things about someone's health. And it seems like you've just taken it further and further. It's fascinating to me. It seems to me that it'll just continue to grow. John Rogers 00:18:49 I appreciate your interest and appreciate you having me on your podcast. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:18:53 Absolutely. Have a great summer professor. Dr. Sanjay Gupta 00:18:56 That was Professor John Rogers, Director of Northwestern's Querry Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics. Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. Our podcast is produced by Eryn Mathewson, Jennifer Lai, Grace Walker, Lori Galloretta, Jesse Remedios, Sofia Sanchez, and Kyra Daring. Andrea Kane is our medical writer, our senior producer is Dan Bloom, Amanda Seely is our showrunner, Dan Dzula is our technical director, and the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Lickteig. With support from Jamis Andrest, John Dianora, Haley Thomas, Alex Manassari, Robert Mathers, Leni Steinhardt, Nicole Pesaru, and Lisa Namarow. Special thanks to Ben Tinker and Nadia Kunang of CNN Health and Katie Hinman.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
What one neuroscientist wants you to know about ‘baby brain'
Editor's note: The podcast Chasing Life With Dr. Sanjay Gupta explores the medical science behind some of life's mysteries big and small. You can listen to episodes here. Science has pretty well established that the brain isn't static; it changes and adapts throughout our lives in response to life events in a process called neuroplasticity. Researchers are discovering this is especially true of female brains, which get remodeled significantly during the three Ps: puberty (as do the brains of adolescent males), pregnancy and perimenopause. All three transitions are a frequent butt of pop-culture jokes: the sulky, risk-taking teenager who only wants to be with friends; the scattered mom-to-be who leaves her cell phone in the fridge and can't remember where she parked the car; and the hormonal middle-aged woman who can't focus and spontaneously combusts with hot flashes. But far from being laughable, these behavioral stereotypes are the external manifestations of big internal shifts, many of them linked to the effects of fluctuating hormones on the brain. Cognitive neuroscientist Laura Pritschet, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, is fascinated by how female hormones, including estrogen and progesterone, affect the brain's organization and functioning. 'The reason I chose that field is because I was a budding neuroscientist as an undergrad, interested in brain networks and obsessing over how intricate everything was in the brain to simply allow us to have a personality or remember things,' Pritschet told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently, on his podcast Chasing Life. 'At the same time in my personal life, I was surrounded by menopausal women who were talking about their cognitive complaints and their attention issues,' she said. 'I thought we've got to connect these two together and understand this more.' Pritschet even volunteered as a 'guinea pig' during graduate school, having her brain scanned and blood drawn for 30 days, across two complete reproductive cycles (both on and off birth control pills), to begin to answer the question of how the day-to-day fluctuations in hormones relate to the day-to-day changes in the brain. Around this time, other researchers were studying what happens in the brain during pregnancy, Pritschet said, looking at the brain before and after gestation. They found many changes, but because the studies took a snapshot approach, many questions were left unanswered. 'If there's a 3 to 5% decrease in total gray matter volume, when is that occurring (during pregnancy), and how is it occurring?' Pritschet asked. 'We're missing huge gaps in what we call this metamorphosis. 'We know that the 40-week gestational window leads to these body adaptations to support the development of the fetus: We have increased plasma volume, immune function change, metabolic rate, oxygen consumption,' she said. 'What does this trajectory look like over gestation?' To find out, Pritschet and her team tracked the brain changes in one woman, using MRI and blood draws, from pre-conception and fertility treatment throughout her pregnancy to two years postpartum. Their findings were published in the journal Nature Neuroscience in September. You can listen to the full episode here. 'We saw this reduction in gray matter volume pretty much across the whole brain,' Pritschet explained. 'We saw increased white matter microstructure and ventricle size.' (Quick anatomy lesson: The brain is made up of gray and white matter. Gray matter is where most of the brain's thinking and processing takes place. White matter helps connect the different brain areas, allowing them to communicate with one another.) 'The inflection point was birth,' Pritschet said. 'We saw that those reductions persisted into postpartum, with slight recovery, meaning that certain areas of the brain showed this rise in gray matter volume in early postpartum. Others did not.' Pritschet said this 'choreographed dance between major features of our brain' is in one respect a physical adaptation to the increased blood flow and swelling that comes with pregnancy. Additionally, the changes may also be a preparation for the next stage: parenting. 'It's a fine-tuning of circuits,' she explained. 'We know that pregnancy is the lead-up to this time in your life where there's a lot of behavioral adaptation that has to occur, and new cognitive demands, and a new cognitive load. 'And so the idea here is that there is this pruning or this delicate rewiring to make certain networks or to make communication in the brain more efficient to meet the demands that are going to have to occur,' Pritschet said. This theory is supported by earlier work. 'The first pinnacle papers that came out looking at neuroanatomy in human women from preconception to postpartum found that degree of change in gray matter volume — that sort of reduction — correlated with various … maternal behaviors (such as bonding). Again, that's all correlation,' she said. 'That's an area we need to do a lot more research on, and it needs a lot of context,' she said. 'But you can expect that if there's fine-tuning in these circuits that underlie cognitive or behavioral process, that the more fine-tuning it undergoes, the better performance you're going to have. That's the idea — but it's so much more complicated than that.' What happens to the brain during pregnancy? Pritschet offers these three insights. The body is the outward sign of a lot of inner upheaval. 'Pregnancy is a transformative time in a person's life where the body undergoes rapid physiological adaptations to prepare for motherhood,' Pritschet said via email. 'But pregnancy doesn't just transform the body — it also triggers profound change to the brain and reflects another critical period of brain development.' She called this remodeling an often-overlooked period of brain development that takes place well into a woman's adulthood. Less gray matter may not sound very positive, but it happens for a reason. 'Despite what one might think, these reductions are not a bad thing, and in fact, are to be expected,' Pritschet said, noting that some of the losses are eventually regained. 'This change could indicate a 'fine-tuning' of brain circuits, not unlike what happens to all young adults as they transition through puberty and their brain becomes more specialized.' These changes could also be a response to the high physiological demands of pregnancy itself, she said, 'showcasing just how adaptive the brain can be.' Mapping these changes could open the door to understanding an array of other neurological and behavioral outcomes including postpartum depression, headaches, migraines, epilepsy, stroke and parental behavior. 'The neuroanatomical changes that unfold during (pregnancy) have broad implications for understanding vulnerability to mental health disorders … and individual differences in parental behavior,' said Pritschet. It may even provide critical insight into how the brain changes over a lifespan, she said. We hope these insights help you better understand the brain changes that occur during pregnancy. Listen to the full episode here. And join us next week for a new episode of the Chasing Life podcast. CNN Audio's Lori Galarreta contributed to this report.
CNN
21-05-2025
- Health
- CNN
3 things to know about brain changes during pregnancy
Editor's note: The podcast Chasing Life With Dr. Sanjay Gupta explores the medical science behind some of life's mysteries big and small. You can listen to episodes here. Science has pretty well established that the brain isn't static; it changes and adapts throughout our lives in response to life events in a process called neuroplasticity. Researchers are discovering this is especially true of female brains, which get remodeled significantly during the three Ps: puberty (as do the brains of adolescent males), pregnancy and perimenopause. All three transitions are a frequent butt of pop-culture jokes: the sulky, risk-taking teenager who only wants to be with friends; the scattered mom-to-be who leaves her cell phone in the fridge and can't remember where she parked the car; and the hormonal middle-aged woman who can't focus and spontaneously combusts with hot flashes. But far from being laughable, these behavioral stereotypes are the external manifestations of big internal shifts, many of them linked to the effects of fluctuating hormones on the brain. Cognitive neuroscientist Laura Pritschet, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, is fascinated by how female hormones, including estrogen and progesterone, affect the brain's organization and functioning. 'The reason I chose that field is because I was a budding neuroscientist as an undergrad, interested in brain networks and obsessing over how intricate everything was in the brain to simply allow us to have a personality or remember things,' Pritschet told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently, on his podcast Chasing Life. 'At the same time in my personal life, I was surrounded by menopausal women who were talking about their cognitive complaints and their attention issues,' she said. 'I thought we've got to connect these two together and understand this more.' Pritschet even volunteered as a 'guinea pig' during graduate school, having her brain scanned and blood drawn for 30 days, across two complete reproductive cycles (both on and off birth control pills), to begin to answer the question of how the day-to-day fluctuations in hormones relate to the day-to-day changes in the brain. Around this time, other researchers were studying what happens in the brain during pregnancy, Pritschet said, looking at the brain before and after gestation. They found many changes, but because the studies took a snapshot approach, many questions were left unanswered. 'If there's a 3 to 5% decrease in total gray matter volume, when is that occurring (during pregnancy), and how is it occurring?' Pritschet asked. 'We're missing huge gaps in what we call this metamorphosis. 'We know that the 40-week gestational window leads to these body adaptations to support the development of the fetus: We have increased plasma volume, immune function change, metabolic rate, oxygen consumption,' she said. 'What does this trajectory look like over gestation?' To find out, Pritschet and her team tracked the brain changes in one woman, using MRI and blood draws, from pre-conception and fertility treatment throughout her pregnancy to two years postpartum. Their findings were published in the journal Nature Neuroscience in September. You can listen to the full episode here. 'We saw this reduction in gray matter volume pretty much across the whole brain,' Pritschet explained. 'We saw increased white matter microstructure and ventricle size.' (Quick anatomy lesson: The brain is made up of gray and white matter. Gray matter is where most of the brain's thinking and processing takes place. White matter helps connect the different brain areas, allowing them to communicate with one another.) 'The inflection point was birth,' Pritschet said. 'We saw that those reductions persisted into postpartum, with slight recovery, meaning that certain areas of the brain showed this rise in gray matter volume in early postpartum. Others did not.' Pritschet said this 'choreographed dance between major features of our brain' is in one respect a physical adaptation to the increased blood flow and swelling that comes with pregnancy. Additionally, the changes may also be a preparation for the next stage: parenting. 'It's a fine-tuning of circuits,' she explained. 'We know that pregnancy is the lead-up to this time in your life where there's a lot of behavioral adaptation that has to occur, and new cognitive demands, and a new cognitive load. 'And so the idea here is that there is this pruning or this delicate rewiring to make certain networks or to make communication in the brain more efficient to meet the demands that are going to have to occur,' Pritschet said. This theory is supported by earlier work. 'The first pinnacle papers that came out looking at neuroanatomy in human women from preconception to postpartum found that degree of change in gray matter volume — that sort of reduction — correlated with various … maternal behaviors (such as bonding). Again, that's all correlation,' she said. 'That's an area we need to do a lot more research on, and it needs a lot of context,' she said. 'But you can expect that if there's fine-tuning in these circuits that underlie cognitive or behavioral process, that the more fine-tuning it undergoes, the better performance you're going to have. That's the idea — but it's so much more complicated than that.' What happens to the brain during pregnancy? Pritschet offers these three insights. The only constant is change The body is the outward sign of a lot of inner upheaval. 'Pregnancy is a transformative time in a person's life where the body undergoes rapid physiological adaptations to prepare for motherhood,' Pritschet said via email. 'But pregnancy doesn't just transform the body — it also triggers profound change to the brain and reflects another critical period of brain development.' She called this remodeling an often-overlooked period of brain development that takes place well into a woman's adulthood. How alarmed should women be? Less gray matter may not sound very positive, but it happens for a reason. 'Despite what one might think, these reductions are not a bad thing, and in fact, are to be expected,' Pritschet said, noting that some of the losses are eventually regained. 'This change could indicate a 'fine-tuning' of brain circuits, not unlike what happens to all young adults as they transition through puberty and their brain becomes more specialized.' These changes could also be a response to the high physiological demands of pregnancy itself, she said, 'showcasing just how adaptive the brain can be.' These changes could affect future health and behavior Mapping these changes could open the door to understanding an array of other neurological and behavioral outcomes including postpartum depression, headaches, migraines, epilepsy, stroke and parental behavior. 'The neuroanatomical changes that unfold during (pregnancy) have broad implications for understanding vulnerability to mental health disorders … and individual differences in parental behavior,' said Pritschet. It may even provide critical insight into how the brain changes over a lifespan, she said. We hope these insights help you better understand the brain changes that occur during pregnancy. Listen to the full episode here. And join us next week for a new episode of the Chasing Life podcast. CNN Audio's Lori Galarreta contributed to this report.
CNN
13-05-2025
- Health
- CNN
Samantha Bee and Dr. Jen Gunter discuss menopause experience, advice
Editor's note: The podcast Chasing Life With Dr. Sanjay Gupta explores the medical science behind some of life's mysteries big and small. You can listen to episodes here. Hot flashes and night sweats. Light, heavy or skipped periods. Mood swings and brain fog. Sleepless nights. Changes to hair and skin. These can all be symptoms of the menopause transition, a natural process that a woman goes through as her brain and body wind down and eventually shut off the ability to reproduce. But honest and open discussions about menopause and the years leading up to it — called perimenopause — have, until recently, been nonexistent. Women's experience have been either ignored or superficially played out in public for laughs, often resulting in a shroud of secrecy and feelings of shame. Treating menopause as taboo even made the process a mystery to the very people going through it. 'When I first started to notice changes in my body, I was probably … 46, 47-ish,' Emmy-award winning comedian and writer Samantha Bee told CNN Medical Correspondent Meg Tirrell recently on the podcast Chasing Life With Dr. Sanjay Gupta. 'And I was starting to do my own show. 'Full Frontal' had just kind of started, and I was under just … immense amounts of stress, no question. 'And I really started to feel like I was not coping well,' she said. 'My body was changing — I was having physical changes — and I actually, literally didn't know what was happening.' Bee, who rose to fame first as a correspondent on 'The Daily Show With Jon Stewart' and later with her own series, 'Full Frontal With Samantha Bee,' said she would stop getting her period for a couple of months here and there. Her hair also started falling out in a way that didn't feel typical. And she developed frozen shoulder, started sweating at night and was on an emotional roller coaster with her insides 'roiling.' Because the majority of her friends are a little younger than she is, Bee said she thought she was 'going crazy' because of her job. She finally confided in her gynecologist that she wasn't sleeping well and 'turning into Lady Macbeth.' 'And she was like, 'Oh, you're in perimenopause.' And I was like, 'There's a word?'' Bee recounted, noting that at the time the topic hadn't really broken the surface of popular culture. 'We're all talking about it now, and you can read about it, and people are like, 'Yeah!' But eight years ago: zip, like zero information,' she recalled. 'Nobody in the conversation. Not cool. Very unsexy. Mention it and you are just like a witch-crone who lives in a cave, don't come out. … I would never in a million years have thought, 'Oh, I'm in perimenopause.'' You can listen to the full episode here. Bee's most recent project, 'How to Survive Menopause,' was born out of her own bewildering experience. She performed her one-woman show in New York City in October 2024, where it was recorded live and adapted for audio by Audible. Having a word and a framework for what she was going through, Bee said, helped put her 'on a path of knowledge.' 'You're de-pubertizing,' Bee said. Her doctor had this helpful guidance: ''Remember all the torment you felt … when you were 15 and … every zit was an operatic tragedy? She was like, 'That's what that is, but just in the other direction.'' The No. 1 thing that helped Bee most, she said, 'is that you have to find a community of people that you can talk to, even if it's just one person.' 'Just saying the words out loud and normalizing it. It's normal. It literally happens to 50% of the population,' she said. 'It's good to make a joke about. It's good to say it out loud. That's actually the main thing that has helped me.' What was not helpful, she said, was turning to social media. 'I don't like to take advice from people who are trying to sell me any type of product. Ever.' Whom did Bee trust? For advice and guidance, in addition to her own doctor, she turned to a woman who has been called 'the internet's gynecologist,' Dr. Jen Gunter. Gunter, who authored the best-selling 'The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health With Facts and Feminism,' is known for debunking myths about this stage of life. 'She told me that some of what happens when you are in perimenopause is that your brain is creating new neural pathways because it's kind of cleaning itself out,' Bee said. 'It's kind of scrubbing out all of the neural pathways related to getting pregnant, feeding a baby, all of those early childhood, maternal pathways in your brain. It clears a little bit of space so it can be a time of tremendous creativity.' Gunter, who said she likes to call it the 'menopause experience' or the 'menopause continuum,' agreed that we don't talk enough about perimenopause and menopause. 'If you've never heard about it, how would you really know what's going on with your body?' she told Tirrell on a separate episode of the Chasing Life podcast. You can listen to the full episode here. 'A lot of women get their symptoms dismissed,' she said. 'But also, the symptoms can be really nonspecific.' For example, she said, women can have irregular periods, heavy bleeding, hot flashes and brain fog for other reasons. 'So, there's a combination of reasons that a lot of people don't realize that's what it is until they're in the middle of it.' How menopause is discussed in the wider culture can also be impactful. 'How you talk about something actually changes your thoughts about it,' Gunter pointed out. 'It means that we have a mind-body experience,' she said. 'Everybody around you is telling you that you're an ugly old hag whose 'time has come,' and all you're seeing are 70-year-old men dating 20-year-old girls. … You could see how someone would feel worse about maybe the changes happening to their body.' Gunter said we speak in euphemisms about men. 'They have 'erectile dysfunction.' We don't say 'penile failure,'' Gunter said. 'If we talked about men's bodies the way we talked about women's bodies, woof, that would be a whole different ball game.' So, what do women need to know about the menopause experience? Here are Gunter's top five facts. Menopause marks the end of an individual's reproductive years. The ovaries cease releasing eggs. 'This is when ovulation stops,' Gunter said via email. 'This means estrogen levels eventually decrease, and production of progesterone stops.' But the progress is not gradual or linear. 'Hormones can be chaotic in the time leading up to menopause, which is known as the menopause transition.' Remember the chaos of puberty? 'Think of menopause like puberty in reverse,' she said. The menopause transition typically starts at the average age of 45, according to Gunter. 'The average age of menopause 51 and the normal range is 45-55.' 'This means for some women symptoms may start in their early 40s, but for others there may be no symptoms until their late forties or even early 50s,' she added via email. In other words, everybody is different, which makes it an unpredictable ride. Gunter explained that an individual reaches the milestone of menopause when she has not had a period for one year. 'Menstrual irregularity is normal in the menopause transition, and when people are reliably skipping a period then menopause is likely 1-3 years away,' she said. No blood or urine tests exist that can indicate whether someone is close to menopause, according to Gunter. Blood work isn't even needed for the diagnosis. 'If you are over age 45 and have gone a year without a period, that makes the diagnosis,' she said. But sometimes more testing is required. 'Blood work is indicated if someone is younger than age 45 and going 3 months or more between periods. The reason for the testing is to identify the cause of the irregular bleeding, and one cause may be premature menopause (age 40- 44) or primary ovarian insufficiency (under age 40),' she said. For people who don't get their periods for other reasons — due to using a hormone IUD or having had a hysterectomy — Gunter said doctors go by symptoms other than bleeding, for example hot flashes. Symptoms can vary greatly from person to person, affect many body systems, and start and resolve at different times. 'The most common symptom in the menopause transition is irregular periods, but they can also be heavy,' Gunter said. 'Everyone is different. Hot flashes and night sweats are common symptoms,' she noted. 'Depression, brain fog and joint pain can happen as well. Vaginal dryness, pain with sex and an increased risk of urinary tract infections are also common concerns.' Menopause also ushers in some physical vulnerabilities. 'The risk of osteoporosis increases with menopause. Menopause also marks a time when there is a change in the risk of diabetes and heart disease, so it's important to be checked for diabetes, have your blood pressure checked and also your cholesterol and lipids,' she said. The best therapies for you will depend on your symptoms and health risks, Gunter said. 'Menopause hormone therapy (also known as hormone replacement therapy) is the gold standard for hot flashes and night sweats, and for women who choose this therapy, it should be an FDA-approved product,' she said via email. 'Hormone pellets and compounded hormones are not FDA-approved and not recommended as the dosing is inconsistent and can lead to unnecessary and serious health concerns. 'Many women have heard the word bioidentical, but it is a marketing term. That being said, women should know that most hormones approved by the FDA are bioidentical,' she said. Should all women entering menopause be on it? 'We do not recommend that every woman take menopause hormone therapy, rather (that) it be prescribed for specific reasons where we have data to show it works or that is biologically plausible that it could help,' Gunter explained. There are several key lifestyle opportunities as well, Gunter said, such as not smoking and eating a balanced, healthy diet. She recommends aiming for 25 grams of fiber every day. 'It's also important to do resistance training and do aerobic exercise, as this improves many health domains,' she said, noting, however, that there is no need to go overboard by, say, running marathons or engaging in competitive weight lifting if you don't already enjoy these activities. To maintain physical fitness, aging adults can follow the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity weekly and two days per week of muscle-strengthening activities of moderate intensity. 'There are no menopause-specific supplements that have been shown in rigorous studies to help with symptoms. Considering the menopause gold rush, I recommend people steer clear of those who sell supplements as their content online is almost always geared for sales, not education,' she said. But if a person has a specific health concern, such as low iron or low vitamin D levels, Gunter said in the podcast, a supplement can be of value. Look for one that has been certified by a third party, such as US Pharmacopeia (USP) or the NSF (the National Sanitation Foundation). We hope these five tips help you understand menopause better. Listen to the full episode with Samantha Bee here and with Dr. Jen Gunter here. And join us next week on the Chasing Life podcast when we look at what happens to the brain during pregnancy. CNN Audio's Grace Walker contributed to this report.
CNN
13-05-2025
- Health
- CNN
Samantha Bee and Dr. Jen Gunter discuss menopause experience, advice
Women's health People in entertainment New in medicine Food & healthFacebookTweetLink Follow Editor's note: The podcast Chasing Life With Dr. Sanjay Gupta explores the medical science behind some of life's mysteries big and small. You can listen to episodes here. Hot flashes and night sweats. Light, heavy or skipped periods. Mood swings and brain fog. Sleepless nights. Changes to hair and skin. These can all be symptoms of the menopause transition, a natural process that a woman goes through as her brain and body wind down and eventually shut off the ability to reproduce. But honest and open discussions about menopause and the years leading up to it — called perimenopause — have, until recently, been nonexistent. Women's experience have been either ignored or superficially played out in public for laughs, often resulting in a shroud of secrecy and feelings of shame. Treating menopause as taboo even made the process a mystery to the very people going through it. 'When I first started to notice changes in my body, I was probably … 46, 47-ish,' Emmy-award winning comedian and writer Samantha Bee told CNN Medical Correspondent Meg Tirrell recently on the podcast Chasing Life With Dr. Sanjay Gupta. 'And I was starting to do my own show. 'Full Frontal' had just kind of started, and I was under just … immense amounts of stress, no question. 'And I really started to feel like I was not coping well,' she said. 'My body was changing — I was having physical changes — and I actually, literally didn't know what was happening.' Bee, who rose to fame first as a correspondent on 'The Daily Show With Jon Stewart' and later with her own series, 'Full Frontal With Samantha Bee,' said she would stop getting her period for a couple of months here and there. Her hair also started falling out in a way that didn't feel typical. And she developed frozen shoulder, started sweating at night and was on an emotional roller coaster with her insides 'roiling.' Because the majority of her friends are a little younger than she is, Bee said she thought she was 'going crazy' because of her job. She finally confided in her gynecologist that she wasn't sleeping well and 'turning into Lady Macbeth.' 'And she was like, 'Oh, you're in perimenopause.' And I was like, 'There's a word?'' Bee recounted, noting that at the time the topic hadn't really broken the surface of popular culture. 'We're all talking about it now, and you can read about it, and people are like, 'Yeah!' But eight years ago: zip, like zero information,' she recalled. 'Nobody in the conversation. Not cool. Very unsexy. Mention it and you are just like a witch-crone who lives in a cave, don't come out. … I would never in a million years have thought, 'Oh, I'm in perimenopause.'' You can listen to the full episode here. Bee's most recent project, 'How to Survive Menopause,' was born out of her own bewildering experience. She performed her one-woman show in New York City in October 2024, where it was recorded live and adapted for audio by Audible. Having a word and a framework for what she was going through, Bee said, helped put her 'on a path of knowledge.' 'You're de-pubertizing,' Bee said. Her doctor had this helpful guidance: ''Remember all the torment you felt … when you were 15 and … every zit was an operatic tragedy? She was like, 'That's what that is, but just in the other direction.'' The No. 1 thing that helped Bee most, she said, 'is that you have to find a community of people that you can talk to, even if it's just one person.' 'Just saying the words out loud and normalizing it. It's normal. It literally happens to 50% of the population,' she said. 'It's good to make a joke about. It's good to say it out loud. That's actually the main thing that has helped me.' What was not helpful, she said, was turning to social media. 'I don't like to take advice from people who are trying to sell me any type of product. Ever.' Whom did Bee trust? For advice and guidance, in addition to her own doctor, she turned to a woman who has been called 'the internet's gynecologist,' Dr. Jen Gunter. Gunter, who authored the best-selling 'The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health With Facts and Feminism,' is known for debunking myths about this stage of life. 'She told me that some of what happens when you are in perimenopause is that your brain is creating new neural pathways because it's kind of cleaning itself out,' Bee said. 'It's kind of scrubbing out all of the neural pathways related to getting pregnant, feeding a baby, all of those early childhood, maternal pathways in your brain. It clears a little bit of space so it can be a time of tremendous creativity.' Gunter, who said she likes to call it the 'menopause experience' or the 'menopause continuum,' agreed that we don't talk enough about perimenopause and menopause. 'If you've never heard about it, how would you really know what's going on with your body?' she told Tirrell on a separate episode of the Chasing Life podcast. You can listen to the full episode here. 'A lot of women get their symptoms dismissed,' she said. 'But also, the symptoms can be really nonspecific.' For example, she said, women can have irregular periods, heavy bleeding, hot flashes and brain fog for other reasons. 'So, there's a combination of reasons that a lot of people don't realize that's what it is until they're in the middle of it.' How menopause is discussed in the wider culture can also be impactful. 'How you talk about something actually changes your thoughts about it,' Gunter pointed out. 'It means that we have a mind-body experience,' she said. 'Everybody around you is telling you that you're an ugly old hag whose 'time has come,' and all you're seeing are 70-year-old men dating 20-year-old girls. … You could see how someone would feel worse about maybe the changes happening to their body.' Gunter said we speak in euphemisms about men. 'They have 'erectile dysfunction.' We don't say 'penile failure,'' Gunter said. 'If we talked about men's bodies the way we talked about women's bodies, woof, that would be a whole different ball game.' So, what do women need to know about the menopause experience? Here are Gunter's top five facts. Menopause marks the end of an individual's reproductive years. The ovaries cease releasing eggs. 'This is when ovulation stops,' Gunter said via email. 'This means estrogen levels eventually decrease, and production of progesterone stops.' But the progress is not gradual or linear. 'Hormones can be chaotic in the time leading up to menopause, which is known as the menopause transition.' Remember the chaos of puberty? 'Think of menopause like puberty in reverse,' she said. The menopause transition typically starts at the average age of 45, according to Gunter. 'The average age of menopause 51 and the normal range is 45-55.' 'This means for some women symptoms may start in their early 40s, but for others there may be no symptoms until their late forties or even early 50s,' she added via email. In other words, everybody is different, which makes it an unpredictable ride. Gunter explained that an individual reaches the milestone of menopause when she has not had a period for one year. 'Menstrual irregularity is normal in the menopause transition, and when people are reliably skipping a period then menopause is likely 1-3 years away,' she said. No blood or urine tests exist that can indicate whether someone is close to menopause, according to Gunter. Blood work isn't even needed for the diagnosis. 'If you are over age 45 and have gone a year without a period, that makes the diagnosis,' she said. But sometimes more testing is required. 'Blood work is indicated if someone is younger than age 45 and going 3 months or more between periods. The reason for the testing is to identify the cause of the irregular bleeding, and one cause may be premature menopause (age 40- 44) or primary ovarian insufficiency (under age 40),' she said. For people who don't get their periods for other reasons — due to using a hormone IUD or having had a hysterectomy — Gunter said doctors go by symptoms other than bleeding, for example hot flashes. Symptoms can vary greatly from person to person, affect many body systems, and start and resolve at different times. 'The most common symptom in the menopause transition is irregular periods, but they can also be heavy,' Gunter said. 'Everyone is different. Hot flashes and night sweats are common symptoms,' she noted. 'Depression, brain fog and joint pain can happen as well. Vaginal dryness, pain with sex and an increased risk of urinary tract infections are also common concerns.' Menopause also ushers in some physical vulnerabilities. 'The risk of osteoporosis increases with menopause. Menopause also marks a time when there is a change in the risk of diabetes and heart disease, so it's important to be checked for diabetes, have your blood pressure checked and also your cholesterol and lipids,' she said. The best therapies for you will depend on your symptoms and health risks, Gunter said. 'Menopause hormone therapy (also known as hormone replacement therapy) is the gold standard for hot flashes and night sweats, and for women who choose this therapy, it should be an FDA-approved product,' she said via email. 'Hormone pellets and compounded hormones are not FDA-approved and not recommended as the dosing is inconsistent and can lead to unnecessary and serious health concerns. 'Many women have heard the word bioidentical, but it is a marketing term. That being said, women should know that most hormones approved by the FDA are bioidentical,' she said. Should all women entering menopause be on it? 'We do not recommend that every woman take menopause hormone therapy, rather (that) it be prescribed for specific reasons where we have data to show it works or that is biologically plausible that it could help,' Gunter explained. There are several key lifestyle opportunities as well, Gunter said, such as not smoking and eating a balanced, healthy diet. She recommends aiming for 25 grams of fiber every day. 'It's also important to do resistance training and do aerobic exercise, as this improves many health domains,' she said, noting, however, that there is no need to go overboard by, say, running marathons or engaging in competitive weight lifting if you don't already enjoy these activities. To maintain physical fitness, aging adults can follow the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity weekly and two days per week of muscle-strengthening activities of moderate intensity. 'There are no menopause-specific supplements that have been shown in rigorous studies to help with symptoms. Considering the menopause gold rush, I recommend people steer clear of those who sell supplements as their content online is almost always geared for sales, not education,' she said. But if a person has a specific health concern, such as low iron or low vitamin D levels, Gunter said in the podcast, a supplement can be of value. Look for one that has been certified by a third party, such as US Pharmacopeia (USP) or the NSF (the National Sanitation Foundation). We hope these five tips help you understand menopause better. Listen to the full episode with Samantha Bee here and with Dr. Jen Gunter here. And join us next week on the Chasing Life podcast when we look at what happens to the brain during pregnancy. CNN Audio's Grace Walker contributed to this report.
