It’s rare these days for a couple to wait until the birth of their baby to find out the sex.
While there are endless ways to find out the birth of your baby from old wives’ tales to internet predictions, most couples wait until the 19-20 week scan to see what lies between their baby’s legs.
A new study has suggested that the pregnant woman’s blood pressure can be a physiological marker that predicts the sex of her baby.
The study has so far found that women who gave birth to boys have a higher systolic blood pressure prior to pregnancy (106mmHg) than women who had girls (103mmHG).
Researchers believe the study between the maternal blood pressure before pregnancy and a baby’s sex offers new information on how human biology works.
The study tracked a group of more than 1400 women in China before pregnancy and after, testing their blood pressure, triglycerides, cholesterol and glucose levels.
Dr. Ravi Retnakaran, an endocrinologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, was the key author of the study. Dr Retnakaran told the Huffington Post that the only physiological characteristics that changed in the mother prior to pregnancy and after (that helped determine the sex of her baby) was blood pressure.
Researchers believe the success of a mother carrying a boy or girl to full term is determined by the mother’s blood pressure before pregnancy.
Dr Retnakaran warns, “One of the things we don’t want is for people to look at this and think, ‘Oh, we can manipulate the blood pressure before pregnancy and thereby change the chances of having a boy or a girl.’ We definitely are not saying that, because we are not showing cause and effect,”
“Moreover, we don’t believe it’s cause and effect. We think it’s a marker of the underlying physiology.”
Mums-to-be are encouraged not to read into their blood pressure levels and get their hopes up on having a particular gender.
At this point the findings have sparked interest around the physiology of the body and it’s an area that has prompted more researchers to explore.
Retnakaran confirms the study is “telling us something very new about [our] physiology.”
