Nausea and vomiting during pregnancy have been recorded at least since the Greeks scribbled about it on papyrus some 4,000 years ago. The Romans hypothesized (wrongly) that boys caused more nausea in their mothers and advised women to fast for one day and take a hot wine bath to combat symptoms.
By the 1960s, doctors were prescribing seemingly more effective drugs to combat the barfing. When one such drug, thalidomide, turned out to cause birth defects in the children born to parents who’d taken it, however, the scandal caused a chilling effect on the study of pregnancy nausea.
But the story of how we finally got a scientific answer to why some pregnant people get sicker than others starts with a woman in the 1990s.
After geneticist Marlena Fejzo experienced a debilitating form of pregnancy nausea, called hyperemesis gravidarum, she found very little in the scientific literature attempting to explain why. Then an early career post-doc, Fejzo decided she would set out to find the answer herself.
Pregnancy nausea was not Fejzo’s professional focus at the time she set out to study it, and she didn’t have funding to embark on any formal research, so she embarked on a bit of a DIY inquiry. She posted a survey online in the early days of the internet and received hundreds of replies via fax from people who’d experienced hyperemesis. Those gave her the first clues that the mechanism at play might be genetic.
On the latest episode of the Unexplainable podcast, I talk to Dr. Fejzo about her pregnancy and her path to finding a biological cause and a cure to pregnancy nausea. Listen below, or in the feed of your favorite podcast app.