Month: August 2012

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Rethinking Reproductive Biology

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Everyone knows that women are born with all the eggs they can ever make, right? Well, a recent study shows that everyone just might be wrong.

This doesn’t just change how we think about reproductive biology. It has real world implications for lots of infertile women too.

A woman makes all of her eggs while she is still in the womb. The way it works is that a group of cells called germ cells divides until they are nearly mature. These 400,000 or so cells then wait around until the woman is born and enters puberty. Then, around one cell per month matures and is released. By menopause, the average woman has released about 400 mature eggs.

Scientists thought for a long time that once ovaries made their batch of immature eggs, they lost this ability forever. They were mistaken. This study showed that a woman’s ovaries still have a few cells that retain their potential to become eggs.

These researchers not only identified these oogonial stem cells (or OSCs), but also managed to collect a few and to coax them into becoming immature oocytes in a petri dish. They then matured these immature oocytes in a mouse’s ovary. These scientists had created new eggs from cells found in a woman’s ovaries.

Red full article.

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Urine Test May Predict Women’s Bone Risk

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A simple urine test before a woman reaches menopause may predict her risk of bone fracture, researchers report.

Several indicators of bone deterioration are known to be associated with fracture, but only women over age 65 and older men are routinely tested for them. Now, researchers report that levels of a substance called cross-linked N-telopeptide of Type 1 collagen, or NTX, which is released into the urine when bones weaken, can predict the risk for future fracture in premenopausal, asymptomatic women.

In a prospective analysis published online in the journal Menopause, the scientists studied 2,305 healthy premenopausal women ages 42 to 52, measuring NTX at the start of the study and following them for an average of more than seven years. During that period, 184 of them suffered at least one fracture.

Read full article.

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Couple’s struggle to have a child leads to surrogacy

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Dawn Kornstein felt the pain again.

The medication wasn’t working. There was nothing more the doctors could do. The contractions kept coming.

Dawn was 5½ months pregnant with twins, and the pain intensified with every breath. Her skin took on a gray pallor. The alarms hooked up to her monitors screamed every 15 minutes or so.

The doctor gave Dawn and her husband, Mike, the grim news: Baby Alex wasn’t going to make it. But if they delivered Alex and tied off the cord, maybe they could save Ben.

Maybe.

Dawn and Mike said goodbye to one son and willed the other to wait just a few more weeks before being born. Those weeks could make all the difference in whether he would live.

Ben died the day after his brother.

Devastated, the couple clung to this mantra: We can try again. We can have other children.

The dream is simple: To have a baby.

In generations past, couples faced with infertility had two choices: adopt a child or accept life without one.

Advances in medicine and science have provided more options: Fertility drugs. Artificial insemination. In vitro fertilization. Sperm donors. Egg donors. Surrogate mothers.

Approximately 2.7 million American couples put their faith in one or more of these options every year.

Still, not everyone who begins the quest ends with a baby. Only about 65% of women who seek fertility treatment ultimately give birth.

There are limits to what science can do, what government allows and what society supports.

Laws have not kept pace with medical innovations, leaving judges to make important decisions about the intersection of biology and parenthood with little or no guidance. What is rewarded as innovation in one state can be outlawed in another.

For some couples, the financial costs climb too high. For others, the personal costs become insurmountable.

This was the new world Dawn and Mike were entering. For them, the key to parenthood lay in Wisconsin – 1,000 miles from their Connecticut home.

Read full article.

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Emotional aid important when facing infertility

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Mara Kofoed was not always hopeful about having kids. When she first started trying for children in 2004, and learned that she had fertility issues, her life seemed full of fear and anxiety. She worried she’d never have children.

Kofoed is one of the 7.4 percent — 2.1 million — of married women aged 15-44 who are infertile, according to the Center for Disease Control. Infertility is defined as trying for pregnancy for 12 consecutive months without success. The study also shows 7.3 million women in this age bracket, or 11.8 percent, struggle with impaired fecundity, or the diminished ability to have children. While there are multiple medical options and remedies for women and men struggling with infertility, there is also a nationwide push toward often neglected emotional and spiritual treatments.

Become Informed

Effective treatments vary for intertility, said Corey Whelan, program director for The American Fertility Association. Because of this, she said, couples who have not been able to have children should become informed about their specific condition and find a specialist to meet their needs.

“It’s very, very important to tell yourself the truth and find out what works,” Whelan said. “Don’t sit in the anxiety for too long. The emotional toll for infertility is really extreme.”

Whelan has seen how lack of education and the perpetuation of inaccurate facts can close doors for women trying to have children. For instance, Whelan said she has known of many women who assume they can prolong their fertility with a healthy lifestyle. While the converse is true — obesity and unhealthy lifestyles will hurt someone’s chance for pregnancy ?— healthy habits will not lengthen the biological clock. Since 20 percent of women have their first child after the age of 35, according to the CDC’s National Survey of Family Growth, Whelen said it is important for them to realize their decreased chances of impregnation, even in spite of good health. Whelan also said women who are older than 35 should consult a specialist after six months of unsuccessfully trying for pregnancy.

Read full article.

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Caffeine Counts

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Practitioners at Tao of Wellness often ask their patients to reduce or eliminate caffeine from their diet because its stimulating effects are counter-productive to their treatments.

Many people rely on regular consumption of excessive amounts of caffeine. While the drinker may only be aware of the pleasant “lift” that caffeine provides, it has many other effects throughout the body. Caffeine stimulates the nervous system, increases heart rate, blood pressure and possibly cholesterol. It raises blood sugar, and increases metabolism. Caffeine can also irritate the gastrointestinal tract, leading to decreased absorption of nutrients.

Avoiding caffeine is especially important for women who are trying to conceive because caffeine consumption may decrease female fertility, as well as being associated with increased incidences of miscarriages, low birth weight, and birth defects found in newborns. Caffeine overly stimulates and eventually depletes the adrenal glands which are associated with fertility and reproduction. Caffeine can also contribute to symptoms of pre-menstrual tension and menstrual cramping.

It is often difficult to have a sense of just how much caffeine you are consuming because companies are not required to reveal caffeine content on their product labels. A general recommendation is to keep caffeine intake to 40 milligrams per day or less. The following list will give you a general idea of how much caffeine is in commonly consumed beverages.

Approximate caffeine content, in milligrams, for eight ounces of beverage. Keep in mind that caffeine content can vary widely between different brands, brewing methods and serving sizes.

  • Brewed coffee 135 mg
  • Black Tea  40 mg
  • Cola  30 mg
  • Green Tea  20 mg
  • Decaffeinated coffee  5 mg
  • Hot Chocolate  5 mg
  • Decaffeinated Tea  2 mg
  • Herbal Tea  0 mg

For more information in Traditional Chinese Medicine go to Tao Of Wellness.

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Noninvasive Embryo Selection Forecast for IVF

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SANTA BARBARA, CALIF. – Unique protein signatures in the media surrounding embryos may soon provide a noninvasive means of identifying viability and aneuploidy, Dr. William B. Schoolcraft predicted at a conference on in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer sponsored by the University of California, Los Angeles.

Biopsies performed during preimplantation genetic diagnosis or comprehensive chromosome screening are “very invasive procedures” that are comparable to surgery or a forceps delivery, said Dr. Schoolcraft.

Removal of the embryo from an incubator, exposure to the heat of a laser, and traumatic manipulation may cause subtle harm, resulting in short- or long-term complications, he added.

But fascinating developments in the laboratory have confirmed dynamic, day-by-day evolutions in the pattern of proteins that are taken up – and secreted – by embryos in culture, providing evidence of distinctive signatures indicating viability, gene expression, and prospects for implantation, Dr. Schoolcraft noted.

To date, his group has identified more than 250 proteins in spent media from embryos, 74 of which are uniquely expressed in that environment.

“Some are excreted only by early embryos, some by embryos throughout preimplantation development, and most interestingly, some proteins are just excreted by embryos on day 3 to day 5, suggesting they might be markers for viability,” said Dr. Schoolcraft, medical director of the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine, Lone Tree.

Read full article.

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More Women Choosing IUD’s

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(Reuters) – A growing number of U.S. women appear to be opting for intrauterine devices (IUDs) as their birth control method, with the number more than doubling in just two years in one study.

Researchers, whose findings were published in the journal Fertility & Sterility, said this is good news, since IUDs and contraceptive implants are the most effective forms of reversible birth control.

But in the United States they are still far from popular, with use lagging well behind birth control pills and condoms.

The study found that in 2009, 8.5 percent of U.S. women using birth control chose an IUD or implant, with the large majority going with the IUD. That was up from just under four percent in 2007.

“We saw some pretty notable growth,” said lead researcher Lawrence B. Finer of the Guttmacher Institute in New York, a sexual and productive health organization.

In France and Norway, about one-quarter of women on birth control use IUDs or implants, and in China 41 percent, Finer’s team said.

Read full article.

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Mother’s Genes May Explain Why Women Outlive Men

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An evolutionary “loophole” might explain why males of many species live shorter lives than their female counterparts, a new study finds.

The loophole lies in the mitochondria, the energy-generating parts of our cells. The mitochondria have their own DNA, separate from the DNA that resides in the nucleus of the cell that we usually think of when we think of the genome. In almost all species, the mitochondria DNA is passed down solely from mother to child, without input from dad.

This direct line of inheritance may allow harmful mutations to accumulate, according to a new study detailed today (Aug. 2) in the journal Current Biology. Ordinarily, natural selection helps keep harmful mutations to a minimum by ensuring they’re not passed down to offspring. But if a mitochondrial DNA mutation is dangerous only to males and doesn’t harm females, there’s nothing to stop mom from passing it to her daughters and sons.

“If a mitochondrial mutation pops up that is benign in females, or a mutation pops up that is beneficial to females, this mutation will slip through the gates of natural selection and go through to the next generation,” said study researcher Damian Dowling, an evolutionary biologist at Monash Univeristy in Australia.

The result: a load of mutations that don’t harm females, but add up to a shorter life span for males.

Read full article.