The gender of a woman’s future child may be linked to her blood pressure six months before she becomes pregnant, a preliminary study suggests.
A team of Canadian and Chinese researchers found that a higher pre-pregnancy blood pressure reading may be associated with a greater likelihood for delivering a baby boy. Conversely, lower blood pressure may favor the odds of giving birth to a girl.
But the researchers only found an association between pre-pregnancy blood pressure and a baby’s gender. They did not prove a cause-and-effect connection.
How might a mom-to-be’s blood pressure predict her baby’s gender? That’s not completely clear. The researchers suspect blood pressure may be related to the gender of those babies carried to term, not lost to miscarriage.
“When a woman becomes pregnant, the sex of a fetus is determined by whether the father’s sperm provides an X or Y chromosome, and there is no evidence that this probability varies in humans,” said study lead author Dr. Ravi Retnakaran.
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