Scent and Jaundice in Newborns Are Normal

Hello everyone, how are you doing today and how is the day going or how was your day depending on when you are reading this post. It's good to be here today and I want to share a one or two things about babies that you might have noticed but do not know much about or understand its scientific explanation or if it has anything to do with science.

I went to visit a lady who just put to bed recently and just like I had always noticed with a lot of newborns, the baby smelt nice. I thought in the past that it was the baby powder, or wipes that came with those scent but when I went to visit this baby, she wasn't on any powder and I still smelt the scent. I realized that just like everything new with its scent, babies had their own new smells as well.

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Human body odor is a result of numerous chemicals secreted in our body and while we can point to the fact that there are a number of chemicals, it is difficult to understand how each of them contributes to this smell. For babies, you might realize that when you go back to check them in about 2 months, the smell always vanishes. this is because the smell usually goes after about 6 weeks and it left researchers to find out what could be the cause of the smell.

In their search for the truth as you would expect of scientist, they have to come up with a lot of hypothesis and postulations and in this light researchers think that the amniotic fluid which protects the embryo as it grow to be one factor. Also,researchers think that the Vernix Caseosa could be the reason for the smell. Till date, there haven't been a concrete cause of the scent but scientists are always looking to both the reason for something and the effect or response to the thing.

So scientists have been looking into the effect the scent causes and they published in a Journal in 2013 that they had found evidences that suggests that the scent affected certain brain areas in women especially those who just gave birth. The study showed that the women that participated showed slight brain activity in the reward region but the activity was more in new mothers. Researchers haven't looked into its effect in men but if they are looking for men to participate in the research, I am sure available because I like the scents babies give.

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Away from that, have you been to the hospital especially the maternity world where you see infants see between the age of 4 to 5 days old? There is almost one thing a lot of them have in common and that is jaundice (the yellowing of the skin and eyes) and this happens as a result of some factors that still falls back to the developing liver of newborns which cannot remove bilirubin from the bloodstream quickly and so causing their skin to become yellow. It doesn't mean it will not eventually become normal, it will just that it will take a small time. It is even more common in premature babies (Jaundice of Prematurity) because their body isn't fully equipped to get rid of the excess bilirubin in the blood.

Not properly breastfeeding babies can also lead to jaundice known as breastfeeding jaundice. When babies aren't properly breastfed, they tend to not have proper bowel movement which then prevents them from excreting the excess bilirubin in the body. Still on the mother and baby jaundice case, blood group incompatibility can also lead to jaundice in the baby as a result of the antibodies in the mother attacking the baby's red blood cell as a result of different blood type.

For most cases of newborn jaundice, they usually go away by themselves as the baby matures but in the case where it is not going away, the baby should be taken to a hospital for proper care using phototherapy or blood transfusion.

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