We now have a map of how pregnancy changes the way organs interact

Through experiments in macaques, scientists have mapped how a range of organs – including the heart, liver and skin – change their interactions during pregnancy, and they expect much of this will also apply in people

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre

1 February 2024

Mapping how interactions between different organs change during pregnancy could help us better understand conditions such as pre-eclampsia

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For the first time, scientists have mapped the metabolic changes that different parts of the body go through during a primate’s pregnancy. The results suggest that pregnancy-related conditions such as pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes might be due to “rewiring” errors when these changes occur.

Outside of pregnancy, different bodily systems usually “feed” each other molecular nutrients, known as metabolites, in a relatively even exchange.

But tissues throughout the body undergo significant changes during pregnancy. For instance, the heart increases its pumping volume by up to 40 per cent. But the thymus, involved in the immune system, “shrinks away really fast” to prevent rejection of the fetus, says Shyh-Chang Ng at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

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Having studied the effects of metabolites on stem cells, Ng was curious about the role they play in pregnancy. During this time, “a lot of things are growing and regenerating… That’s something you only see in cartoons or superhero movies where the person transforms”, he says.

To learn more, Ng and his colleagues took 273 tissue samples from 12 crab-eating macaques , including when the monkeys were in each of the three trimesters of pregnancy, as well as when they weren’t pregnant. The samples came from 23 bodily sites, including the uterus, liver, spinal cord, skin, blood and five regions of the heart.