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Your Comprehensive Guide to Pregnancy Hormones

Pregnancy is a beautiful (and wild) ride—a transformative experience that is marked by significant physiological and emotional changes. Hormones are the chemical messengers that jumpstart these changes, ensuring your body is prepared for pregnancy, labor, and eventually, motherhood. Understanding the role of these hormones and the impact they’ll have.

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 Chemical messengers: how pregnancy hormones affect the body

Multiple hormones produced by the mother, placenta and the foetus drive and coordinate the amazing biological changes and development of the baby that occur with conception, foetal growth and birth.

Articles of Interest

Birth partners – all you need to know about pregnancy hormones and how to support your pregnant partner

If there is one thing we know about pregnancy, is that pregnant women can become somewhat emotional, right? Those pesky pregnancy hormones can really make pregnancy hard going for her – and also, for you, as her partner! But dig deeper and you’ll find that those hormones are actually performing vital functions to grow your baby and keep your partner’s pregnancy working well. Let’s take a closer look at what they’re doing.

How Hormones Change During Pregnancy and Affect Your Body

Let’s take a look at how their levels fluctuate depending on your stage in pregnancy and your body’s needs.

How Pregnancy Hormones got the Best of You

Having a baby isn’t easy. Although men try to understand it, they just don’t get it. They never get it because the major changes in the body (and the moods!) does not happen to them. It happens to YOU. You can point the blame on pregnancy hormones.

Maternal hormone shuts down baby’s brain cells during birth

His group found that this chemical volte face is triggered by the mother, through an all-important, multi-purpose hormone called oxytocin. Oxytocin is another neurotransmitter, and one that is almost synonymous with social relationships. It has been linked to sexual arousal, feelings of trust, love and monogamy. During childbirth, massive amounts of oxytocin are released by the mother and can reach the foetus via the placenta. Artificially adding oxytocin to the brain tissue of foetal rats caused cells to ignore GABA just as they do before delivery. And giving expectant mothers atosiban, an anti-oxytocin chemical, stopped this from happening. It seems that oxytocin’s long list of abilities now includes temporarily shutting down an infant’s nervous system during birth.

Maternal hormones during early pregnancy: a cross-sectional study

Little is known about correlates of first trimester pregnancy hormones as in most studies maternal hormones have been measured later in gestation. We examined the associations of maternal characteristics and child sex with first trimester maternal concentrations of 4 hormones implicated in breast cancer: human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), α-fetoprotein (AFP), insulin-like growth factor (IGF)-I and IGF-II.

Pregnancy nose isn’t the only weird change your body may go through when you’re expecting

The reason it happens is due to the significant increases in hormone levels that happens during pregnancy – particularly because of the increase in oestrogen, which relaxes the blood vessels in all the body’s tissues. This allows more blood into the nose’s tissues, causing it to expand and change shape – looking larger and puffier. These hormonal changes can also cause a runny and stuffy nose (pregnancy rhinitis) and nosebleeds, which affects one in five pregnant women.

Pregnancy Problems Linked to Hormone

ABNORMALLY high amounts of a hormone in the first phase of the menstrual cycle have been linked to infertility and miscarriages in a British study of nearly 200 women. The high amounts of the hormone, called LH, for luteinizing hormone, were detected in 193 women 21 to 43 years old using a standard blood test on the eighth day of the menstrual cycle, the study's authors reported in the current issue of The Lancet, a British medical journal.

Pregnancy transforms the brain—and some changes last forever

For the first time, scientists have observed the brain throughout the pregnancy timeline, from pre-conception to postpartum.

The 6 Pregnancy Hormones: How They Affect Your Body & Support Baby

As chemical messengers, hormones help manage your body’s functions, from blood pressure to appetite to hair growth. And once you get pregnant, your pregnancy hormones prepare your body to have a baby—and they come with some fun (or not so fun) side effects too.

The How's and Why's of Pregnancy Hormones

As your body develops to accommodate the growth of your baby, hormones play a role in regulating all the changes. In doing so, your pregnancy hormones—the same ones that cause you to cry at commercials or make your body ache in new ways—are taking to task that your baby makes it to the delivery date safely.

What happens to your brain when you’re pregnant – clumsiness, food cravings, and moodiness?

But what explains klutziness in early pregnancy? During the first few weeks, levels of a hormone called relaxin rise rapidly. Like the name suggests, relaxin relaxes the body’s joints, ligaments and muscles, which is especially useful in helping stretch the pelvic region during delivery.

Why Are Pregnant Women So Sweaty?

The short answer is, we don’t know for sure, because there’s a lack of systematic research on the topic (more on that in a bit). But it probably has to do with their ever-shifting hormones. During pregnancy, there’s a huge rise in the levels of progesterone and estrogen. Once you give birth, the levels of those hormones fall off a cliff.

Why Most Pregnant People Experience Morning Sickness—and How It Could Be Treated

Past scientific research suggested a hormone called GDF15 plays a role in morning sickness. GDF15 is known to be linked to nausea, and it has been tested as a weight loss aid, according to Science’s Catherine Offord. The body can produce a lot of it in response to stress.

Resources

6 Ways Pregnancy Hormones Change Your Body

When you become pregnant, some major physical and emotional changes are set in motion, which affect everything from your boobs to your mood. To get to the bottom of what hormonally induced changes—both the good and the not-so-desirable—you can expect when you're expecting,