Researchers at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP) are recruiting healthy women of reproductive age with no history of recurrent miscarriage and having at least one child to study recurrent pregnancy loss without an established cause.
Recurrent pregnancy loss affects about 5% of pregnant women worldwide, and it is estimated that about half of cases remain unexplained.
Diane Vaz’s research and doctoral dissertation aims to promote better understanding, diagnosis and care for women suffering from recurrent miscarriages in a “guideline” effort that aims to provide answers to “an extremely distressing condition for women and couples.”
Pregnancy loss or recurrent miscarriage, a scientific term, is characterized by the loss of two or more consecutive pregnancies up to 24 weeks of gestation.
“It’s very different to tell a woman she has a condition and we don’t know why, or to say she has a condition but we know the reason and we can study it and understand it better,” he defended.
This study, as the FMUP researcher explained to Lusa, is a contribution to making it possible, in terms of clinical and genetic counseling, to redirect these women who have no reason for pregnancy loss.
To advance this research, the FMUP team is recruiting healthy women of reproductive age, with no history of recurrent miscarriage and having at least one child, to form a “control group” and serve as the basis for comparison with the group. recurrent miscarriage was diagnosed.
Volunteers, he explains, will not undergo any invasive test, that is, an endometrial biopsy. All that is required is to collect samples of menstrual fluid.
The samples, which will be obtained through a menstrual cup available free of charge, will compare endometrial epithelial cells from healthy women with cells from women who have experienced recurrent pregnancy loss, the latter being collected in collaboration with the obstetrics service at the University of San Francisco Hospital. João (CHUSJ).
The researcher estimates that at least 15 to 20 women are needed in each group to ensure reliable results.
The FMUP team, led by Sophia Doria, the project’s principal investigator, will essentially focus its research on two families of endogenous retroviruses.
“Endogenous retroviruses arise from hereditary insertions into our genome, meaning they are present in our genetic material and are normal. This is something that is explained by an evolutionary process, and not the result of any infection,” explained Diana Vaz.
Preliminary studies have shown that, compared with healthy women, these retroviruses have lower expression in the endometrium of women with recurrent pregnancy loss, indicating that these families of retroviruses “must have vital functions in the endometrium, must be disrupted and must, in in turn, are the cause of these losses,” the researcher concludes.
The role of retroviruses in worsening diseases such as Covid-19 has already been proven. A study by the Center for Technological Development in Health (CDTS/Fiocruz), published in 2021, concluded that the presence of human endogenous retrovirus K family (HERV-K) is not only associated with the most severe cases of Covid-19. 19, but also to early mortality from this disease.
This discovery paved the way for new treatments for patients most seriously affected by the infection.
HERV-K is an ancestral virus that infected the human genome when humans and chimpanzees began to distance themselves at an evolutionary level.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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