You may have got used to some ways that are ancient enough to predict your baby’s gender. But how about the Blood Pressure of a mother-to-be? Can a mother’s blood pressure foretell the gender of a baby? Well, that is what a recent study claimed. Apparently, there is a link between the blood pressure of a woman before she conceives and the gender of her baby. The study has discovered that women with lower blood pressure before pregnancy have more chances of giving birth to a baby girl.

The study that was led by Dr. Ravi Retnakaran, an endocrinologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Canada, made the finding that a higher BP was an indicative of conception of a boy. Lower bp, obviously, meant a girl. The study was published in the American Journal of Hypertension.

It appears that a woman’s blood pressure prior to her pregnancy is a key factor in sex-determination of a baby, but it remained unrecognized previously, according to Dr. Retnakaran. This newly found insight might begin to influence the procreation and help gain a new insight into the basic mechanisms that underscore the sex ratio in humans, adds Dr. Retnakaran.

The observations might imply that there may be primary underlying differences in how a woman can have a probability of sex-specific loss of the fetus or the likelihood of conceiving a girl or a boy. Such factors are, however, not known in humans. While it is known that the gender of the fetus is determined by whether the fetus receives an X or Y chromosome, the proportion of the female or male fetuses lost during pregnancy might vary. A mother’s physiology might have a great impact on the survival of the fetus for that matter. It turns out that lower blood pressure of the mother is less suitable to the survival of a male fetus while the higher blood pressure of the mother is less suitable to the survival of the female fetus, concludes Dr. Retnakaran.

The scientists assessed a yet-to-conceive cohort comprising young women who were intending to conceive in the near future. They used the model to assess the association between health before the pregnancy stage and the gender of the baby.

Volunteers in the study were subjected to baseline medical evaluation at the induction and then with the subsequent pregnancy, they were followed throughout the pregnancy till delivery through clinical care.

The study that began in February 2009 had recruited 3375 women in Liuyang, China. 1,692 women out of these were assessed for blood pressure, triglycerides, cholesterol, and glucose. Further, 281 women of these numbers who were potentially pregnant at their baseline assessment were excluded based on regressing the gestational period at delivery. The remaining 1,411 women were recruited to conceive. Their BP was checked at around 26.3 median weeks before conception, and they were followed throughout the pregnancy. Their pregnancies resulted in 739 boys and 672 girls.

The mean adjusted systolic BP before conception was found to be higher (03.3 millimeters of mercury) in women who deliver a boy than in those who delivered a girl (106.0 millimeters of mercury). This result was calculated after adjusting for age, smoking, BMI, waistline, LDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, triglycerides, glucose and also the education levels.

It emerged that higher maternal blood pressure before pregnancy resulted as an independent predictor for subsequently giving birth to a boy.

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