Shares of Depomed slid Friday after a panel of advisers to the Food and Drug Administration overwhelmingly voted against its drug to treat hot flashes and other symptoms of menopause.
Month: March 2013
More Sunlight Months During Pregnancy (Above 42 degrees North) Gives Newborns Longer Thighbones, Study Claims
The seasonal variation of sunlight in Ireland means newborns from Caucasian women who had more sunlight months during their pregnancy (April – Sep) are more likely to have longer thighbones, according to new research.
Pregnant in Medical School
Soon after starting medical school, my periods had stopped. Further evaluation led to a diagnosis of hypothalamic amenorrhea, a form of infertility in which insufficient hormones for ovulation are produced. I had always thought of having children, but years down the road, in my 30s, with an established career. At that time I was 27, going to school more than 300 miles away from my husband. Starting a family was not at the top of my mind.
Survey Tallies Menopause Symptoms’ Toll
As hot flash severity rises, productivity and quality of life may fall.
Sperm Swim Against the Current
Human and mouse male reproductive cells find the egg by migrating upstream.
Stress and anxiety linked to sperm quality
(Reuters Health) – A man’s ability to produce sperm may depend on his ability to handle stress, according to a new study from Italy.
Researchers found that men with higher levels of both short- and long-term stress and anxiety ejaculated less semen and had lower sperm concentration and counts. Men with the highest anxiety levels were also more likely to have sperm that were deformed or less mobile.
But one fertility researcher not involved in the new work said it’s hard to know how the results apply to the general population because the research included men who were already seeking treatment at a fertility clinic.
“Do you become stressed from becoming infertile or is stress causing infertility?” asked Tina Jensen from Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, who has studied the effects of environmental factors on sperm quality.
Previous research has found that men going through fertility treatment or evaluation have higher stress levels than the average person, and some studies have also shown links between stress and sperm quality, according to the Italian researchers, led by Elisa Vellani of the European Hospital in Rome. Read full article.
Infertile couples turn to disputed therapy
As their van rumbled away from the McDonald’s, onto the Arizona road and toward Mexico a mile away, the Kowalskis wondered if the family they’d long envisioned having would finally become real.
Jennifer Benito-Kowalski and Steve Kowalski had traveled 950 miles from their San Carlos home. A clinic just over the border would be the latest stop in a journey three years in the making: the quest to get pregnant.
Natural conception hadn’t happened, fertility treatments had failed and the doctors were out of ideas. At 38, Benito-Kowalski worried she’d never be a mother.
Ultimately, the Kowalskis would pay a surrogate in India to carry their child, who is due in May. But that decision was months away.
In 2011, the couple turned to the Alan E. Beer Center for Reproductive Immunology and Genetics, a Los Gatos clinic with an international reputation for curing frustrated, vulnerable women of infertility.
But the clinic’s methods involve experimental therapies that outside studies have concluded do not work and that insurers often do not cover. One therapy, in which a woman is repeatedly injected with her partner’s blood cells, has been prohibited in the United States for more than a decade. That hasn’t stopped Beer’s doctors from directing hundreds of patients to clinics outside the country to have it done – and pay thousands of out-of-pocket dollars. Read full article.
New biopsy procedure helping women avoid repeat miscarriages
HOUSTON (KTRK) — Miscarriages can be devastating for couples who are hoping for children, and it’s especially hard when a woman has repeated miscarriages. But now there’s a high-tech procedure to help avoid repeat miscarriages and save parents-to-be from heartbreak.
Victoria is five months old. But at one point, her mother wasn’t sure she would ever be able to have a baby. Charlotte had six miscarriages before she deliver Victoria.
“It was frustrating because you’re pregnant the you’re not, you’re pregnant you’re not,” Charlotte said.
Chromosome abnormalities are one of the top reasons for miscarriages. But at Houston IVF at Memorial Hermann Memorial City, women who have had multiple miscarriages are being offered a new technology that allows infertility specialists to find the embryo most likely to survive.
“We can actually find the embryos that are chromosomally normal and only transfer the normal ones back,” Houston IVF Dr. Timothy Hickman said.
They biopsy the outer cells, not the embryo itself. That makes the test less invasive and more accurate. Read full article.
Estrogen therapy may fight early Alzheimer’s
Women who carry a gene that puts them at increased risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease show signs of early aging at the cellular level long before the first hints of dementia might set in, when they appear otherwise healthy and active, a team of UCSF and Stanford scientists found.
But there’s good news, too. When those women used hormone replacement therapy to treat symptoms of menopause, evidence of advanced aging disappeared. After just two years on hormones, women with the gene looked, under a microscope, the same age as their peers without the gene.
The research, which was published last week, is still preliminary and only involved a small sample of women with and without the Alzheimer’s risk gene. It raises a host of fascinating questions: What effect does the Alzheimer’s gene have on aging overall? What role do hormones play in aging? Can replacing the hormones women lose as they age prevent diseases like dementia?
There are not many answers, but the research findings add to the already complex and controversial discussion about hormone replacement therapy and who will benefit from it. Read full article.