Foetal heartbeat can adjust to mother’s

A NEW study has found that a foetus in the womb can adjust its heart beat to synchronise with its mother but in cases where no synchronisation occurs, it may signal a problem with the foetus’s development.

According to scientists who made the breakthrough, their discovery of this previously unknown connection has paved the way for a new technique to detect developmental problems during pregnancy — opening up the potential for early medical intervention while the child is still in the womb.

Dr Marco Thiel, one of a team of physicists from the University of Aberdeen who worked on the study, said the synchronisation referred to here is not actually a one-to-one mother-baby beat (ie the mother’s heartbeat is not at the ‘galloping horses’ rate of her unborn baby) but a consistent ratio of heartbeats.