Fertility Roundtable: Insights into Emerging Research

Nicole is a researcher, bestselling author (Healthy Home Healthy Family) and founder of the Healthy Home (Building Biology) movement in Australia. She established the Australian College of Environmental Studies in 1999 to educate people about the health hazards in the built environment. Nicole has lectured at tertiary institutions for over 30 years, has published in peer reviewed journals and is regularly consulted by the media to discuss mould, electromagnetic fields and toxic chemicals, and lectures in Australia and abroad about environmental health issues. Her PhD research explored the impact of environmental exposures on human health and their ramifications for general medical practice.

Carolyn Ledowsky is the founder of MTHFR Support Australia. She is currently undertaking her PhD at the University of Technology Sydney where she is investigating methyl folate vs folic acid in women with recurrent miscarriage. She is a Health Scientist, Researcher, naturopath, herbalist and nutritionist who has a Bachelor of Health Science (Naturopathy) Honours, Bachelor of Herbal Medicine, Bachelor of Naturopathy, Advanced Diploma of Naturopathy and Diploma of Nutrition and a Bachelor of Economics from Sydney University. She has also studied courses in genetics at Duke University (Genetics and Evolution) and The University of Maryland (Genes and the Human condition – from behaviour to biotechnology). Carolyn spent 12 years studying chronically ill patients from all over the world, who have searched, sometimes for decades, to find the reason behind their ill health. Her strength lies in her ability to reveal layers of dysfunction and not give up until results are seen. Most of her patients have MTHFR mutations and/or associated methylation disturbances. Her key passions are fertility, anxiety and depression. Carolyn believes that practitioners who understand genetic susceptibility will be the ones that thrive in the business as patient health outcomes will be significantly improved and their practice will grow with longer wait lists and people wanting to understand more about how they can regain and maintain health for life. The secret to successfully unravelling chronic health conditions is the ability to understand a person’s genetic susceptibility and overlying environmental contributors that shift the biochemistry significantly away from the person’s ability to cope with an infection, exposure, bacteria or assault of some type. Her practice specialises in genetic susceptibility and how this contributes to biochemical dysfunction and chronic health conditions.