endometrium

Circle? Circle.

This causes the endometrium, which is that thick lining of the uterus, to break down and shed through the vagina.

This is your actual menstrual period, is the endometrium lining shedding through your vagina, not the bullshit you get on a withdrawal bleed during the pill.

The follicular phase actually includes the menstrual phase and is days 1 through 14.

But we kind of think of those as two different phases, yes.

HCG acts similar to luteinizing hormone and maintains the corpus luteum.

And remember, we need the corpus luteum to be maintained to produce the progesterone to support the early stages of pregnancy.

The endometrium is maintained and eventually the placenta takes over for steroid hormone production.

This podcast takes a closer look at the latest clinical guidelines, research, and topics in obstetrics and gynaecology through conversations with leading experts.

Today, we're discussing cystic spaces in the endometrium on ultrasound and the correlation to endometrial hyperplasia or cancer.

We'll be unpacking the article published in Ansjog entitled Cystic Spaces in the Endometrium on Ultrasound and Correlations with Pathological Diagnosis.

Joining me today is lead author of the study, Dr Rosie McBain.

Rosie, could you please introduce yourself?

But you're looking for an ulterior route to miscarriage, which is this story of decidualization.

So instead of being an issue with the seed, it's an issue with the soil, if we imagine your endometrium is the soil.

Yes.

If I may, I'd like to start a little bit with where this work came from.

And also, pretty much every single randomized control interventional clinical drug trial has shown no benefit neither.

So it's almost like we do the same thing year in, year out, decade in, decade out, hoping for a different answer, and it's never forthcoming.

So the consequence of that encounter was that we then started to work in earnest on the question, how does the endometrium invest in embryos? What is in that interaction in early pregnancy? What are the biological hurdles that you need to overcome in order to invest in the right pregnancy now? The whole concept has become quite understandable.

So on the one hand, it's been known for a very, very long time that there is a background trait, as you mentioned, of chromosomal errors that will arise in eggs.

I wish there was one test that I could do that could just do all of this, but unfortunately, we still have to take a number of steps to get all these answers before we do a transfer.

So the ERA test is one of the endometrial receptivity tests.

Stands for Endometrial Receptivity Assay.

I run my patients through a mock embryo transfer before their transfer, and that's basically taking the same medications that you would take for the transfer, combination of estrogen and then estrogen and progesterone, and then we do a really gentle biopsy on the lining of the uterus, send cells off, and find out if I gave the patient the right number of hours of progesterone for them.

Right? It's basically the timestamp or the time for your evite for the embryo party.