How a mother's blood pressure can define the gender of the baby

According to popular belief, pregnant women who crave sweet things, get sick in the morning and have a watermelon-shaped belly tend to be pregnant with girls.

Recent research by Canadian scientists reveals that the gender of babies can be predicted even before a woman becomes pregnant. The future mom's blood pressure, around the 26th week before conception, is already a predictor of whether she will have a boy or a girl.

Basically, higher blood pressure indicates that a woman has a much higher chance of having a boy; whereas a low blood pressure indicates that she is likely to be a girl's mother.

The research, conducted by endocrinologist Dr. Ravi Retnakaran, was done by establishing connections from studies that have worked with the factors that determine the gender of children - factors ranging from stressful events such as wars and natural disasters to the physiological characteristics of the parents of babies. .

A lot of pressure?

For example, it is known that in times of great stress there is a greater chance of fetal survival in children of a particular gender. In this new research, the measurement of women's systolic blood pressure showed that the average 10 by 6 facilitated the conception of boys and the average 10 by 3 girls.

According to Retnakaran, this survey suggests that when the mother has a higher blood pressure, the chances of survival of fetuses in girls are lower, just as the opposite happens in women with a lower blood pressure.

The study evaluated 1, 411 newly married Chinese women who were trying to conceive. They had their blood pressure measured at periods that, on average, closed at 26 weeks before conception of their children and then continued to be monitored throughout pregnancy. Of these women, 739 gave birth to boys and 672 to girls.

They were also evaluated in aspects such as age, education level, smoking, BMI, waist circumference measurements, cholesterol levels, triglycerides and glucose.

Other opinions

Charles Kingsland, a fertility expert at Liverpool Women's Hospital, explained that statistically women with health problems tend to miscarry more when they are pregnant with boys and that he believes blood pressure can also be a gender indicator. in terms of design.

Still, he says the study did not take ethnic aspects into account, so it is not known whether these results apply to women everywhere: “What if you want a girl? Are you just going to live in Syria for a few months? ”He asked.

For other subject matter experts such as Geoffrey Trew of Hammersmith Hospital in London, the relationship between blood pressure and gender definition of a fetus is a big news: “Some reptiles may have sex differences due to temperature variations during fetal development, but not 26 weeks before conception, ”he said.