Check Your Blood Pressure If You're TTC

Pregnancy Over 40 and High Blood Pressure

Years ago, when I was working in the "corporate pressure cooker" I would have intermittent high blood pressure readings when I took time out of my work day for doctor's appointments.
My site: www.getpregnantover40.com
Aside from high blood pressure being a dangerous condition, it can also negatively affect female (and male) fertility. Here is a link to the Blood Pressure Association which discusses high blood pressure and how to manage it if you're planning a pregnancy:


Blood Pressure Association

From the link above:

"If you have high blood pressure and are planning to have a baby or if you are already pregnant and have high blood pressure then these pages are for you. They provide information about prevention and treatment, along with antenatal care and pre-eclampsia.

Planning to become pregnant

If you already have high blood pressure and you and your partner are planning to have a baby you need to talk to your doctor about preparing to conceive. You can, like any other woman, have a successful and healthy pregnancy but if you have high blood pressure you have a slightly greater chance of complications than other women do. For this reason you will need to be more closely monitored than women without high blood pressure.

If at all possible any medicines that you take for high blood pressure will be stopped by your doctor before you become pregnant. You should not become pregnant whilst you are taking atenolol (beta-blocker), ACE Inhibitors or Angiotensin Receptor Blockers as these medications can affect the development of your baby. Therefore it is important that you plan your pregnancy if you can. Examples of ACE inhibitors and Angiotensin Receptor Blockers are in the table below.

ACE Inhibitors
Angiotensin Receptor Blockers

Captopril, Cilazapril, Enalapril, Fosinopril, Lisinopril, Perindopril, Ramipril, Trandolapril
Candesartan, Eprosartan, Irbesartan, Losartan, Olmesartan, Telmisartan, Valsartan


However, some women will have to continue to take tablets for high blood pressure. If this is the case then you may find that your blood pressure falls in the middle of your pregnancy. If this happens, the tablets might be stopped. There are certain medicines that can safely be taken during pregnancy, so if you need to continue to take medications, there are choices available."

Actress Tracey Gold Talks About Preconception Communication

Pregnancy Over 40 and Preconception Communication 

This article has moved
  (see my previous post here: Preconception Communication)

 

SEE ALSO: VISION BOARDS FOR PREGNANCY VISUALIZATION (getpregnantover40.com) 

Know Your Menstrual Cycle Week By Week

Here is a great resource with quite a detailed explanation of what happens each week of your menstrual cycle. If you're trying to conceive, this will help you know exactly what is going on and helpful things you can do or avoid to maximize your chances of conception. This site is written from a Chinese Medicine perspective. Read more:

infertility.health-info.org

From the site:


The Ovarian-Hypothalamus-Pituitary female sexual hormonal axis. If this regulatory system is balanced the woman will feel very little changes throughout her cycle. Most women have some kind of imbalance, therefore they do feel the changes in their cycle, although, these are good ways to get to know what is going on, and aids in the process of rebalancing. 10-15% of miscarriages happen due to hormonal imbalances. Many infertility problems are due to hormonal ovulatory disorder. It makes good sense to get to know this part of you and start balancing it today.

How Successful Is Tubal Reversal?

Pregnancy After Tubal Ligation Reversal

I have heard from a number of women who had tubal ligations who years later, decided they wanted another child.
My site: www.getpregnantover40.com
 Here is an article from Inciid.org on the pregnancy success rates after a tubal reversal:

Pregnancy Rates after Tubal Reversal (Inciid.org)

"The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the outcome of tubal reversal in patients and determine which factors influenced post-reversal pregnancy rates. Participants were 202 women with a mean age of 35 years (ranging from 27 to 45), who had an average of 1.7 children prior to to undergoing sterilization. Sterilization had been accomplished in 100 patients via Fallope ring and via electrocautery in 53 cases, with the remainder of patients undergoing a variety of less common techniques. An average of 8.5 years elapsed between the time of the original surgery and the reversal, with a range of two to 21 years.

Prior to reversal, patients underwent:

Hysterosalpingogram
Pelvic ultrasound
Partner semen analysis
Diagnostic laparoscopy, if the method of sterilization was unknown
All procedures were set up so that, if accomplishing reversal via laparoscopy was determined to be non-feasible, the procedure could immediately be converted to laparotomy.

One hundred eighty-six patients were followed for a minimum of 12 months after surgery (the remainder were lost to follow-up), and analyses were conducted to examine the effects of the following variables on post-surgery pregnancy rates:

Original method of sterilization used
The location of the tube where reconstruction was carried out
Post-surgery tubal length
Whether other pelvic pathologies were discovered and removed during surgery
Whether one or both tubes were restored to function
The age of the patient at surgery
Ninety-eight of the 186 patients delivered healthy infants during the follow-up and 31 had ongoing pregnancies at the close of the study. Analyses of the above variables (which took all factors into account simultaneously) indicated two significant effects, age at surgery and whether one or two tubes were successfully repaired:

Among patients aged 25 to 29 years, the pregnancy rate was 100 percent; 30 to 34 years, 91.9 percent; 35 to 39 years, 79.5 percent; and 40 to 45 years, 70.6 percent.
Patients who only had one tube successfully reversed had a pregnancy rate of 60 percent, compared to 87 percent for patients who had both tubes successfully reversed.
Based on these results, the authors concluded that in the hands of a skilled and experienced surgeon, a laparoscopic approach to tubal reversal is an effective protocol. They also concluded that, in many cases, the success rates of tubal reversal are far superior to IVF (another treatment of choice for women with tubal sterilization who are now interested in fertility), suggesting that it may be a preferable approach for many patients, especially in view of the fact that tubal reversal does not carry the elevated risk of multiple pregnancy that IVF does."

HOW DHA HELPS FERTILITY AND PREGNANCY

Pregnancy Over 40, Try DHA

You've probably heard of the importance of taking fish oils - not just for fertility, but for a number of other conditions.
The reason fish oil is recommended is because of DHA. If you don't know what DHA is, here is an article that  explains how it can help fertility and pregnancy:

From the article:

I also believe that a dietary component may be involved. Americans are eating far more carbohydrates today compared to the 1960s, and this has caused a dramatic surge in our insulin levels. Another clue to increased female infertility may involve an imbalance in eicosanoids since research has indicated that low-dose aspirin significantly improves the success rates in women undergoing in-vitro fertilization. This would suggest that my dietary recommendations might provide a unique intervention to improve fertility. Let me discuss why.

SEE ALSO DHEA AND FERTILITY (getpregnantover40.com)

A primary cause of female infertility is polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). This condition is linked to increased insulin levels. In women with PCOS, the ovaries release an egg from a follicle sporadically, if at all, instead of the usual every 28 days. These irregular cycles can be corrected once women with PCOS lower their elevated insulin levels, At this point their fertility almost magically reappears. Unfortunately, even after women with PCOS become pregnant, they still have higher rates of miscarriages. Thus, simply reducing insulin levels alone is not the total answer. The other important factor appears to be an imbalance of eicosanoids that can be treated with the increased consumption of fish oil. Epidemiological studies of pregnant women who consume large amounts of long-chain Omega-3 fatty acids, like EPA and DHA, found in fish oil tend to carry their babies for a longer period of time. They also have a correspondingly lower rate of premature births which can cause physical and neurological problems such as learning disabilities. Since 6 to 10 percent of all births in America are premature, I feel it is quite likely this unfortunate statistic may be linked to our growing decrease of long-chain Omega-3 fatty acids containing EPA/DHA in the diet.
from 
www.cbn.com