![]() Cardiologists use the term “remodeling” to describe these changes, but when things go wrong, the consequences are far more serious than a misplaced sofa throwing off the feng shui. To deal with this increased workload, the cardiac cells and pumping chambers of the heart must grow and transform in size and shape. The volume of blood that is circulating expands nearly 50 percent. Even a healthy pregnancy places significant stress on the heart. Late in pregnancy, women are at risk of developing life-threatening diseases such as preeclampsia and heart failure. I'd become so breathless and exhausted rushing up just two flights of stairs that once, on my way to a cardiac arrest, another physician pulled me aside to express concern for my cardiac health. I was the slowest doctor in the herd of physicians responding to code blue alerts for medical emergencies at the hospital. ![]() That would be the end of the line for that mother, her gestating calf and ultimately the species itself.Īs I publicly expressed admiration for the giraffe's gestational athleticism, I privately cringed a bit recalling how unathletic-how un-giraffe-like-I had felt as a cardiologist in the final weeks of my own pregnancies. If they couldn't, predators would quickly target them as easy prey. Yet pregnant giraffes appear to flee as fast as nonpregnant individuals. She has gained hundreds of pounds-her fetus alone weighs up to 150 pounds, but the load is much heavier when you add in the placenta, extra fluid and fat. To do so, they have evolved impressive physiological adaptations.Ĭonsider a giraffe in the last weeks of her nearly 15-month gestation. Even in their final, heaviest days of pregnancy, females must evade predators. Predators pose a daily threat to survival for all prey species, and they don't give pregnant animals a pass. Given the importance of female health challenges such as pregnancy to the survival of a species-including our own-shouldn't the realities of female life in the wild be more than an afterthought for doctors and biomedical researchers? I suspected that few, if any, of the assembled scientists and physicians had considered this question when first taking in the scene. I watched the crowd scan the troop of giraffes for evidence of pregnancy-a baby bump, a lagging mother-to-be. The theme of that year's conference was bioinspired medicine-finding solutions in nature to human health problems-and I wanted to call attention to the connections between women and other female animals.Īs a cardiologist and evolutionary biologist, I'd been posing this question about the giraffes to medical students in my courses at Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles, for years, so I could tell it had landed as planned. With the video set to loop, the giraffes gallop endlessly, giving me time to slowly lean across the podium and ask my audience: “Did you spot the pregnant giraffes?” I am delivering a plenary lecture at the 2019 Nobel Conference in Stockholm. Projected on the massive screen behind me onstage, a herd of giraffes rushes across a sweep of savanna.
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