Over the last few years, Flint, Michigan, has been in the news due to findings related to lead in its water supply. New research that examined the impact of exposure to lead (in the air and topsoil) on fertility in the United States has found that exposure matters for both women and men. It is the first study to find causal evidence of the relationship between lead exposure and fertility rates in the 1980s and mid-2000s. The study, by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, is published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research. "Until now, we have lacked causal evidence of the effects of lead exposure," explains Karen Clay, professor of economics and public policy at
Xi Xiaoxin, 35, never thought that she would have trouble conceiving three years ago. Back then, all she wanted was to enjoy traveling the world with her husband, whom she married in 2012. But when she came around to the idea of starting a family three years later, the road to conception turned out to be rough. "Not until recent years did I realize that it could be so difficult getting a baby," she said. Xi is one of hundreds of thousands of largely urban Chinese women struggling with infertility. Like elsewhere in the world, delaying motherhood has become more common in China, with high costs of living, long working hours, unfriendly maternity policies and high child care costs. Some specia
Results of a recent study to better understand modifiable factors such as physical activity that may affect a woman's ability to conceive a child suggest that walking may help women to improve their chances of becoming pregnant. The study was conducted by recent graduate Lindsey Russo and her advisor Brian Whitcomb, associate professor of biostatistics and epidemiology in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Russo and Whitcomb's findings among healthy women ages 18 to 40 years old with a history of one or two pregnancy losses are based on their secondary analysis of the multi-site Effects of Aspirin in Gestation and Reproduction (EAGeR)
Using the gene-editing tool CRISPR to snip at DNA is often akin to using scissors to edit a newspaper article. You can cut out words, but it's difficult to remove individual letters or instantly know how the cuts affect the meaning of the text. Someday, CRISPR could be used to "clip" disease-causing genetic mutations in patients. But such precision medicine is impossible so long as CRISPR remains a clumsy tool. In work that will help make the gene-editing process more precise, researchers at the Joint Institute of Metrology and Biology (JIMB, a collaboration between Stanford University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST), have developed a new kind of CRISPR platf
Stem cells have the remarkable potential to develop into many different cell types. Now, using mouse stem cells instead of the usual sperm and egg, scientists have created a structure like a blastocyst -- an early embryo. "What we did is, for the first time, we managed to promote the self-organization of stem cells into a very early embryo in a dish -- so everything happened in the lab," said Nicolas Rivron, lead author of the new study and a biologist, engineer and assistant professor at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. The research was published Wednesday in the international science journal Nature. 'Human pregnancies are very inefficient' To achieve this scientific feat, Rivron a
Maintaining five healthy habits -- eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, keeping a healthy body weight, not drinking too much alcohol, and not smoking -- during adulthood may add more than a decade to life expectancy, according to a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Researchers also found that U.S. women and men who maintained the healthiest lifestyles were 82% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and 65% less likely to die from cancer when compared with those with the least healthy lifestyles over the course of the roughly 30-year study period. The study is the first comprehensive analysis of the impact of adopting low-risk lifestyle factors on lif
