Pregnancy and Immunology

I am Dr Mohan Raut. I am practising Gynaecology from last 27 years and partner of ICPRM, India's first Immunotherapy centre for patients of treatments with repeated miscarriages or IVF failure or Implantation failure.

Today I am going to talk on an interesting topic, Pregnancy as Nature's miracle and how Immunology plays an important role in pregnancy maintenance?

Our body has a defence mechanism for Immunology system which protects us from various diseases. So anything which is foreign to our body is not acceptable to our body and our body builds up and immunological response against that. This is how the bacteria viruses which are prone to enter our body are prevented by our immunological system. Even in case of transplant is done, suppose kidney transplant, our body will not accept any kidney. It has to be matched with our body, tissue match is important. In a transplant, the kidney is donated by blood relation which can be easily acceptable.

Now in pregnancy lets see what happens. In pregnancy, 50% is from the mother and 50% is from the father. Now the part which comes from father's body is a foreigner to mother's body. So practically, there should be a rejection of pregnancy, but it doesn't happen. Because normally, there are immunological mechanisms within mother's body which protect the pregnancy in the uterus. Now in some unfortunate women, these mechanisms don't react normally or they are abnormal and because of which mother's immunological system considers the pregnancy as foreign and builds up an immunological response against the pregnancy. This stops the growth of pregnancy and leads to miscarriage. Now depending upon on what stage this response becomes maximum, we can get maximum presentations;

• Like when the response is late, then there will be a pregnancy, then the growth will stop and leads to miscarriage.
• If it an early stage possible, then there will be only a pregnancy test positive. Nothing will be seen in sonography and there will be a biochemical pregnancy.
• Or if happens very early, before missing the periods, then it leads to implantation failure and infertility.

So this is called as Alloimmune problem, responsible for miscarriages. This problem can be diagnosed with certain tests and can be treated with the treatment called immunotherapy.

In my next video, I will tell that how we can diagnose various immunological problems and other causes of repeated miscarriages.

For more information, you can contact me on www.lybrate.com.

Thank you.