Are women the weaker sex? This ancient theory has been officially dismantled by science. And it is that a team of researchers from the University of Granada (Spain) in collaboration with the Hospital Clínico San Cecilio de Granada, has shown that there is an association between the gender of a newborn baby and its ability to cope with inflammatory processes and oxidative stress after childbirth; some premises that would condition the ability of the baby to face future / possible postnatal pathologies.
Newborn girls have a higher antioxidant defense and less oxidative damage to cell membranes compared to boys, that is, girls respond much better to stress than boys.
In addition, mothers who give birth to girls instead of boys, also have a greater antioxidant defense of their body, less damage to the main biomolecules and a much less pronounced inflammatory process during childbirth than those mothers who give birth to children, showing that childbirth is less aggressive for the mother if it is a girl.
In their study, the researchers involved 56 healthy pregnant women : 27 of them gave birth to boys and 29 of them girls. After delivery, they took blood samples from the vein and artery of the umbilical cord and the newborn, in order to analyze oxidative stress and inflammatory signaling.
The results showed that girls have more mature enzyme systems at birth than boys, reducing damage to cells and improving cell metabolism.
The work, the first to examine induced stress in both mothers and neonates in the perinatal stage, thus reveals that both newborn girls and their mothers have better endurance and better qualities than boys – and their mothers – to cope with the incredible event that involves giving birth. There is thus a very clear relationship between the gender of the newborn, inflammatory signaling and the oxidative process.
“Therefore, the gender of the newborn baby not only influences how the mother deals with the birthing process, but also conditions the way in which the neonates face the hyperoxic environment that constitutes the extrauterine environment, showing the sex of the neonate as a conditioning factor in relation to multiple functional alterations with important repercussions for the mother during the postpartum period and for the newborn during the rest of his life ”, the authors affirm.
The study has been published in Nature’s Pediatric Research journal.
