Wednesday February 6 2:18 PM ET
LONDON (Reuters) - Sex, and plenty of it, not only increases the odds of getting pregnant, it can also help avoid problems that sometimes lead to miscarriages and stillbirths, New Scientist magazine said on Wednesday.
Having sex early and often, even oral sex, with the intended father can reduce the chances of the mother's immune system rejecting the fetus.
``According to reproductive biologists at the University of Adelaide in South Australia, far from being an exercise in futility, plenty of sex -- even a full year before conception -- helps guard against a litany of ailments,'' the magazine said.
The more accustomed the woman's immune system is to the man's sperm, the less likely her body will be to reject the fetus, which contains foreign proteins from the father, according to the scientists.
Immediate rejection of the fertilized egg can cause infertility or, if the mother's immune system works more slowly, miscarriages can occur.
The Australian scientists also suggested that immune rejection could lead to pre-eclampsia, a potentially fatal condition that can cause high blood pressure and convulsions in women. But they said the theory was still controversial.
``We see patients that have two miscarriages, then they finally manage to get through their miscarriage period and they have pre-eclampsia, or the placenta detaches and they have a stillbirth at 24 weeks,'' Gustaaf Dekker, a member of the research team, told the magazine.
The placenta is the lifeline of the fetus, supplying oxygen and nutrients.
Sperm is full of foreign proteins, so the woman's immune system goes into high alert at the first sign of it, but the scientists said it also contains components that promote acceptance by the woman's body.
``If there's repeated exposure to that signal, then eventually when the woman conceives, her (immune) cells will say: 'We know that guy, he's been around a long time, we'll allow the pregnancy to continue','' Dekker added.
(This is a cached version of an article originally located at http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20020206/sc/health_sex_dc_1.html )