In the world, one of the most expected questions people ask to expecting parents is: “is it a boy or a girl?” Most parents wonder about this as well, whether for early preparation or other cultural reasons. Through the years, many studies have claimed whether changing certain activities (specific lifestyle factors), such as the woman’s body chemistry and diet, as well as the positions taken during intercourse and the timing of conception could help determine their unborn child’s sex.
A group of Scientists from China and Canada, including an Indian-origin researcher, have found yet another factor that could affect a baby’s sex whether a woman is more likely to be carrying a boy or a girl: blood pressure before pregnancy.
In the study, there is a relation between mother’s blood pressure and gender of the upcoming baby before six months of pregnancy. The new study discovered that the blood pressure of mother plays a major role in the delivery of child as blood flow in women’s body before six months of the pregnancy is linked with the sex of the baby.
Dr Ravi Retnakaran, endocrinologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, said: “It suggests that a woman’s blood pressure before pregnancy is a previously unrecognised factor that is associated with her likelihood of delivering a boy or a girl.”
The study was started in the year of 2009, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B for instance showed that women who ate more cereals and potassium-rich food were more likely to deliver a baby boy.
The research is controversial because of the practice of Natural gender selection, whether it is possible to predict or choose the sex of a baby — in which female babies are aborted or even killed after birth. That has always generated a lot of interest in male-dominated societies and most of the research on this topic is not conclusively supported by the robust scientific community due to genuine scientific evidence (scientists tend to identify associations rather than causal links).
The new study published in the American Journal of Hypertension presented evidence that a specific-factors (mother’s blood pressure) before pregnancy can influence an offspring’s sex. The scientists conducted their study with 1,411 newly married women from Liuyang, China, who were assessed for their blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides (fat in the blood) , and glucose levels. These women all became pregnant shortly after a median time of 26.3 weeks. The research observed and the successful pregnancies resulted the births of 739 baby boys and 672 baby girls.
According to a new study, higher systolic blood pressure before six months might link with the birth of the baby boy (106 mmHg) while lower systolic blood pressure is associated with the birth of the baby girl (103.3 mmHg), about 2.6% lower. Women can control whether they have a boy or girl by increasing or decreasing their blood pressure before conceiving, Canadian researchers have found.
These findings suggest that maternal blood pressure before pregnancy could be a predictor of whether women are going to deliver a boy or a girl.
The results are to be taken with caution, although the findings are interesting and not meant to tell parents how to get a boy or a girl, the researchers stress that they do not want people to try and manipulate their blood pressure in an effort to give birth to a certain gender. This study again does not prove a causal link between the mother’s blood pressure and the baby’s sex, it only highlights a strong interrelation.
“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,” Retnakaran said. “Moreover, we don’t believe it’s cause and effect. We think it’s a marker of the underlying physiology.”
