Talk:Microchimerism

I'm going to restore my previous lede (with some alterations) and revert parts of the recent changes to this article. While the article was improved in some ways, the new 'nulligravid vs nulliparous' section is way too long and tedious, IMO, dragging out to paragraphs a topic that can be summarized fairly quickly, in a manner such as this:

"A good critique of studies trying to determine the causes of male microchimerism in women is that these studies have only looked at parity (where any offspring have been born or not, particularly sons when it comes to this subject) and not gravidity (total sons conceived) among women. To rule out fetal transfer as the only source of male microchimerism in women, you can only look at cases of nulligravida: women who never even conceived a fetus. The easiest way to get female subjects confirmed to be completely nulligravid would be to examine prepubescent girls since they cannot conceive a fetus."

I do think this is a valid critique of that study and a potential limitation they did not mention themselves, so good work there. The edits detailing the Danish study on male microchimerism in (presumed) nulliparous girls is already in the article, so I will create a new section devoted to that study and merge the two descriptions, as this study is both important in reviving the concept of telegony and one of the few that explicitly claims that male microchimerism in women can be induced via unprotected sexual intercourse.

The 'term definition' section is also redundant and contains several erroneous definitions. For example, it claims "The term maternal microchimerism refers to a mother absorbing DNA from her child in uteruo" when the cited references states the very opposite, as it says "These cells may persist for a long time, and circulating maternal cells have been detected for up to 62 years in the offspring, resulting in the so-called maternal microchimerism (MMc)". Thus it is obvious maternal microchimerism is when an organism contains cells from the mother, conversely, 'fetal microchimerism' is microchimerism induced in a woman via the two way transfer of cells between the fetus and the mother that occurs via the umbilical cord when a woman is pregnant ("Fetal microchimerism is defined as low levels of fetal cells harbouring in maternal blood and tissues during and for years after pregnancy", https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4989712/). Similarly, male microchimerism is simply the chimerism of male tissue (of any origin, in this sense it refers to the presence of genetic tissue of male origin being discovered in girls/women) with another organism. Tediously defining these terms does not improve the article, IMO, so I am going to move those terms to the new lede. Altmark22 (talk)

I've made the proposed edits. If you object to these edits then please state your arguments as to why here and we can think of incorporating them into the article, instead of engaging in edit-warring, which is against the rules and not something I can be bothered with, in any case.

Non-Genetic Alternate Theory: Psychological Imprinting

There is this idea floating around that says who she had sex with, remains with her even if she dates other guys.

Non-Transfer Alternate Theory: Sexual Imprinting

Could it be possible that instead of genes being passed around, it is merely an extension of the Female Fecundity Effect and Assortative Matching?