Super-fertility or the ability to accept too many embryos can put women at a higher risk of multiple miscarriages, experts say.
Findings of the study published in the journal PLoS ONE found multiple miscarriages more common among some women as they accept even poor embryos. The poor quality of the embryos, make the pregnancy end up in failure.
According to the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), recurrent miscarriage is the loss of three or more repeated pregnancies with the same biological father before the end of 12 weeks (first trimester). About one to two percent of women are affected with the occurrence.
Investigators from Princess Anne Hospital in Southampton and the University Medical Center Utrecht analyzed six women with history of recurrent miscarriages and another group with normal fertility.
Poor and high quality embryos were placed in the participants' wombs. In normal fertility group, cells accepted only high-quality embryos. But, in women who had miscarriages, cells accepted both high and poor embryos.
"In half of women who have recurrent miscarriages, we don't know what the cause is, and many affected women feel guilty that they are simply rejecting their pregnancy. But we have discovered it may not be because they cannot carry; it is because they may simply be super-fertile, as they allow embryos which would normally not survive to implant," professor Nick Macklon, a consultant at the Princess Anne Hospital, told the Daily Mail. "When poorer embryos are allowed to implant, they may last long enough in cases of recurrent miscarriage to give a positive pregnancy test."
However, researchers reassure the need to conduct further experiments to confirm the findings.
"This theory is really quite attractive. It is lovely. It's a really important paper that will change the way we think about implantation," Dr. Siobhan Quenby, from the Royal College Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, told the BBC. "It had been thought that rejecting normal embryos resulted in miscarriage, but what explains the clinical syndrome is that everything is being let in."
