Month: June 2012

Fertility Clock Headlines, Fertility Headlines

Penn researcher looks at infertility’s impact on women

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Marni Rosner, who earned a doctorate in social work at the University of Pennsylvania in May, studied how infertility impacts female identity in her dissertation, “Recovery From Traumatic Loss: A Study of Women Living Without Children After Infertility.”

“I was curious as to how women living without children after infertility rebuilt their identity and life after this traumatic loss,” Rosner says. “There was little research that focused specifically on the long-term adjustment of women who experienced infertility and had not gone on to become parents either through biology, adoption or third-party reproduction.

“There was really no other research that focused solely on this population in this era, with numerous reproductive options and so many life choices available for women.”

Rosner, 46, lives and works in Manhattan, where she established her own private psychotherapy practice in 2000. She says that, while there is a great deal of existing research that addresses the psychological impact of infertility for women who are actively experiencing it, almost none examined the post-treatment phase.

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Fertility Clock Headlines, Fertility Headlines

Letter of support for Family Planning Summit

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This July, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the British government’s Department for International Development (DFID) will hold the London Family Planning Summit. This Summit is a golden moment: an opportunity to change the way that family planning – as a part of reproductive health – will be supported and provided around the globe. The event signals a major commitment by governments, donors, corporations, and others to work towards meeting family planning needs, such as information, services, and supplies, for developing countries by 2020. It may leverage and release significant amounts of funding for family planning advocacy and services.

International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF)’s is working to garner civil society signatories for a global letter of support. This two-page letter (available in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese) will be submitted to David Cameron and Melinda Gates and will be published in a Financial Times supplement just before the Summit, along with the names and logos of all the agencies who sign on. The letter has been carefully crafted, taking into account comments received from more than 220 NGOs across 53 countries.

Read full article.

 

 

Fertility Clock Blog, My Future Baby Blog

Infertility and Men

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Infertility is a problem for 15 percent of couples trying to have a baby. Problems with the man in the family can account for a large percent of the problem.

Mike, Danielle and 9 month old Ava are a lovely family. It’ll be Mike’s first Father’s Day, and a special one. It took five years for the Mateos to conceive a child.

“It’s going to be overwhelming especially after hearing that it might not have happened for us. It makes it all the more special,” Mike said.

The Mateos spent four years and a lot of money. They went through many procedures without success. Enough to frustrate any couple.

“We just didn’t want to hear that we couldn’t have a child,” Mike said.

So they went for a second opinion with Dr. Hyacinth brown. She found that Danielle had an immune system problem that was hampering pregnancy, and that Mike had a low sperm count.

Read full article.

Fertility Clock Headlines, Fertility Headlines

U-M registers six new embryonic stem cell lines

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The genetic mutation responsible for a blood clotting disorder known as hemophilia B is among two embryonic stem cell lines created by the University of Michigan and believed to be the first in the world to carry the disease, officials announced Thursday.

The two stem cell lines are among six new lines created by U-M and added to the national registry, bringing the total number of lines the university has created to eight.

The lines are available for federally funded research by scientists across the country to study the origin and potential treatments for diseases such as Huntington’s disease, a fatal brain disorder, and a heart condition known as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which causes sudden death in athletes and others.

“Our last three years of work have really begun to pay off, paving the way for scientists worldwide to make novel discoveries that will benefit human health in the near future,” says Gary Smith, Ph.D., who derived the lines and also is co-director of the U-M Consortium for Stem Cell Therapies, part of the A. Alfred Taubman Medical Research Institute.

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Fertility Clock Headlines, Fertility Headlines

Single hormone shot can replace daily doses in IVF: study

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(Reuters) – Women preparing for fertility treatment get a series of daily, sometimes uncomfortable, hormone shots to kick their ovaries into overdrive, but a European review of previous studies suggests that one long-acting shot may work just as well.

In an analysis of four past studies including over 2,300 women with infertility, researchers found the women were just as likely to get pregnant – and didn’t have any more complications – when they got a single, long-acting dose of follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH).

For in vitro fertilization, extra FSH is used to trigger the ovaries to grow and release multiple eggs, which are then fertilized outside the body and transferred to the uterus.

“Long-acting FSH (weekly injection) is a good and safe alternative to daily injections in the first week of ovarian stimulation for IVF,” said Jan Kremer from Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in the Netherlands, who worked on the study.

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Fertility Clock Headlines, Fertility Headlines

Birth Control Tied To Heart Attack And Stroke, But Risks Very Small, Study Says

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A sweeping new Danish study concludes that hormonal contraception increases the risk of heart attack and stroke, but the overall risk for individual women is very low.

“The amount of attention paid to these minuscule risks, and what are likely to be very small differences in vascular risk, detracts attention from more salient issues, like preventing unwanted pregnancy,” argued Dr. Diana B. Petitti, a professor of biomedical informatics at Arizona State University. Petitti wrote an editorial accompanying the findings, which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday.

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Fertility Clock Headlines, Fertility Headlines

Stop Our Sperm, Please

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Meet the men who want better male birth control – and want it badly

Lenny Smalls, whose Facebook page says he lives in Chicago and works as a transportation analyst, is very interested in long-acting, reversible male contraception. According to his posts on a fan page for one form being tested — known as RISUG or Vasalgel — Smalls is sufficiently frustrated by the pace of such drugs coming to the U.S. market to have begun personally testing an Indonesian herbal product called gandarusa.

“I plan to become the guinea pig and test this products effect on myself and my sperm,” he wrote recently. “I will take 1 pill daily and record how I feel everyday. After 30 days, I will see my doctor and have my sperm tested to see if it was effected by the supplement.” Earlier this week, Smalls’ plan ran into a hitch when the first doctor he saw refused to cooperate. (Smalls did not respond to interview requests, though he did agree to friend this reporter on Facebook.)

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Fertility Clock Headlines, Fertility Headlines

Unhealthy Lifestyle May Not Affect Sperm Count

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Men who smoke or drink or even do drugs may not be jeopardizing their fertility, says new study. Researchers say that unhealthy lifestyle might not affect the swimming sperms men produce.

“Despite lifestyle choices being important for other aspects of our health, our results suggest that many lifestyle choices probably have little influence on how many swimming sperm they ejaculate. For example, whether the man was a current smoker or not was of little importance. The proportion of men who had low numbers of swimming sperm was similar whether they had never been a smoker or a smoker who was currently smoking more than 20 cigarettes a day. Similarly, there was little evidence of any risk associated with alcohol consumption,” said Dr. Andrew Povey from the University of Manchester’s School of Community Based Medicine.

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