You have your mom’s cells in your brain right now

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You have your mother's cells in your brain right now. If she ever carried you, yours are in hers.

Scientists looked at the brains of 59 women after they died, ages 32 to 101. In 63% of them, they found their sons' DNA scattered across different brain regions. The cells had traveled from the womb, through the blood, past the wall that normally keeps foreign material out of the brain, and settled in. The oldest woman still carrying her son's cells in her brain was 94. In mice, those cells became functional brain cells.

The transfer starts as early as 7 weeks into pregnancy. Your cells slip through the placenta into your mother's body. Hers slips into yours. One study found a mother still had her son's cells in her blood 27 years after giving birth. After delivery, between 50 and 75% of women carry their child's cells. During pregnancy, up to 6% of a woman's blood DNA comes from the baby.

When a mother's heart gets damaged during or after pregnancy, the baby's cells travel to the injury, latch on, and turn into beating heart cells, blood vessel lining, and muscle. Heart failure tied to pregnancy has a 50% spontaneous recovery rate, better than every other kind. The Mount Sinai team behind the research thinks the baby's cells are fixing the mother's heart from the inside.

The cancer data caught me off guard. A study compared healthy women to women with breast cancer. 85% of the healthy group still carried their children's cells. Only 64% of the breast cancer group did. That works out to about 4x lower odds of getting breast cancer if you kept those cells. The working theory is that they patrol the body and catch cancer cells before they grow.

A 2022 study found that in developing mouse brains, a mother's cells controlled the brain's immune cells, preventing them from cutting too many connections between brain cells. Your mom's cells helped wire your brain before you were born.

And it stacks across generations. A woman can carry cells from her kids, from her own mother, and even from pregnancies her mother had before her. Three generations of cells from different people, living inside one body.

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