The nausea and vomiting that, in extreme cases, can endanger mothers and babies might soon be just a memory
DR MICHELLE GRIFFIN Michelle is the director of MFG Health Consulting, as well as a women’s health expert and strategy advisor in women’s health tech.
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We’ve all experienced vomiting at some stage in our lives, whether it’s from a nasty bout of food poisoning or the well-known norovirus that periodically spreads through the population. And everyone can agree that it’s horrendous.
But imagine if ongoing nausea and vomiting was expected for a significant phase in your life, and how that would affect you physically, mentally and emotionally. This is the reality for the four in five women who develop nausea and vomiting during pregnancy. Even in milder cases this means unpleasant symptoms, such as queasiness, lack of appetite and throwing up.
For the three per cent of women who develop a condition called hyperemesis gravidarum, things are even worse, requiring hospital admission and treatment.
Hyperemesis gravidarum is a collection of symptoms including such severe nausea and vomiting that a woman can’t normally eat or drink, resulting in dehydration, nutrient deficiency and weight loss – putting the lives of both mother and baby at risk. According to the Office of National Statistics, this led to nearly 20,000 women being admitted to hospital in 2022.
Yet despite it being very common, until recently hardly anything was known about the cause of nausea and vomiting in pregnancy. Anecdotes or ‘old wives’ tales’ suggest that the more sickness you experience, the ‘healthier the pregnancy’ and that it even relates to the number of babies you’re pregnant with.
Real-world evidence, however, shows there’s no truth to this. In fact, there’s a wide range of severity and patterns of nausea and vomiting throughout pregnancy.
Although it’s often called ‘morning sickness’, nausea and vomiting in pregnancy can occur at any time day or night. It’s typically worse in the first 12 weeks and then settles down, but for many women it persists throughout the whole pregnancy.
Fortunately, after over 20 years of work trying to determine the cause, there has now been a breakthrough. This has been driven by Dr Marlena Fejzo, a geneticist at the Keck School of Medicine of USC in California.
Dr Fejzo was motivated to do this work after suffering from nausea and vomit
