| If you are a Surrogate mother, or woman that bears a child on the behalf of another woman, you may have heard about future treatments using Valproic Acid and Vitro Development. This is pretty scientific stuff. Valproic Acid is a synthetic crystalline compound. It is used in the treatment of epilepsy seizures and mood disorders. It goes by many brand names, such as Depakene, Depacon, Stravzor, Depakote and Valproic. It carries a pregnancy risk, category D and has been tested recently in Vitro Development. This article is meant for general informational purposes only. It is not meant to hold any scientific, academic or medical purpose. Please ask your doctor or medical expert for more in-depth information on this topic. Two abstracts were read from the NCBI website. Links to these abstracts will be provided at the bottom of this page. The first article was titled, “Valproic acid improved in vitro development of pig cloning embryos but did not improve survival of cloned pigs to adulthood.” The second article was titled, “Valproic acid enhances in vitro development and Oct-3/4 expression of miniature pig somatic cell nuclear transfer embryos.” Like I said, very scientific stuff. The question arises, will these studies aid surrogate human mothers in the future? That is a bit of a stretch. The study was conducted using pigs and the studies seemed to be for research purposes and for the purpose of conducting experiments to discover their results. Plus, some of the findings did not seem all that positive. It might be a bit like saying that conducting a study about automobile efficiency might be able to help you brush your teeth more effectively. You might be able to figure out a way to connect the two if you try hard enough, but the findings seem preliminary. Here is the conclusion that the two studies came to. The first study concluded: “In conclusion, VPA treatment increased the blastocyst formation rate of SCNT porcine embryos; both VPA-treated and the untreated clones developed to term, but offspring from VPA-treated embryos had a lower survival to adulthood than those from control embryos (18.2% vs. 67.0%; P < 0.05).” And here is what the second study concluded: ”The results indicate that VPA enhances the ability of miniature pig SCNT embryos to develop into blastocysts and maintains the ability of them to express Oct-3/4 gene.” I am not a scientist, and I could be completely misinterpreting the findings, but from my reading I understood the study to say that the pigs that underwent Valproic Acid treatment had a lower survival rate than the pigs that did not undergo the Valproic Acid treatment. Time will tell as more experiments are conducted, but at this time Valproic Acid does not seem to be an effective treatment. All information from this article has been collected by Google searches. This article is meant for general informational purposes only. It is not meant to hold any scientific, academic or medical purpose. Please ask your doctor or medical expert about true information on this topic. |