If you ask any mother, they will most certainly tell you that having a child had a lasting impact on them. But little did they know becoming a mother may have made more of a difference on them than they imagined. Researchers are finding that during pregnancy cells of the fetus will travel from the placenta to other areas in the mother’s body. Sometimes they will be destroyed once the mother gives birth, but in some cases they can remain in the mother’s body for years after having a child.
Whether this will help or hurt the mother is the precise question researchers from Arizona State University are asking. Microchimerism, or the term used to describe fetal cells migrating to maternal tissue, has been a conflicting topic of research, often reaching contradicting conclusions about just what role these cells play in the mother’s body. Researcher Dr. Amy Boddy at the Arizona State…
