(having problems in posting on main board just keeps redirecting me)
will put the interesting bits
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/health/womenfamily.html?in_article_id=464381&in_page_id=1799
My body tried to kill my baby
After three failed attempts at IVF, Julia Kantecki began to lose hope that she and her husband Robert would ever conceive a child.
"My baby dream was slipping away. I was 40 and fearful of shrivelling into menopause and a childless future," says Julia, 45, a former marketing director.
Robert, 56, had had a vasectomy 20 years earlier and IVF was the couple's only chance of having a child together.
Since her mother had had five children without a problem, Julia, who lived in Doncaster at the time, assumed everything would go smoothly. So it came as an enormous disappointment when she failed to become pregnant.
The worst part was that the IVF doctors couldn't offer any definitive explanation for the failure. But her experience is far from unusual - although many women assume that the wonders of modern medicine mean they will conceive easily with IVF, in fact the success rate is around 20 per cent.
But doctors from the Alan E Beer Center for Reproductive Immunology, in San Francisco, believe they may be caused by a woman's immune system going into overdrive and wrongly attacking her embryos as if they were foreign bodies
She was told that three IVF failures indicated possible immune problems. Blood test results showed that Julia had abnormally high levels of natural "killer" (NK) cells - thought to help keep the body from developing cancer - and harmful antibodies that doctors at the clinic said were attacking her embryos.
"They told me that my body was treating pregnancy as if it was dealing with a cancer and killing my babies before they'd had time to implant in my uterus properly," says Julia.
An added complication was an inherited clotting disorder making her susceptible to developing blood clots in the placenta, which could also endanger her embryos.
When women tell me they're always healthy and never get infections, alarm bells start ringing since it suggests their immune systems are working overtime," says Dr Raphael Stricker, who took over as medical director of the Beer Center after the death of Dr Beer last year
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I just post the stories, for interest.. for everyone
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene ii
Voltaire said: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
H.L.Mencken wrote:"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.â€
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein