Author: brigitte

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Chance To Pause Biological Clock With Ovarian Transplant Stirs Debate

brigitte

When Sarah Gardner was 34, she started getting really worried about whether she’d ever have kids.

“I bought this kit online that said that they could tell you your ovarian reserve,” Gardner, now 40, says. These kits claim they can tell women how long their ovaries will continue producing eggs and how much time they have left to get pregnant.

“Well, mine said, ‘we advise really you have a baby now.’ Well, sadly that letter arrived three weeks after I just split up with my long-term partner. So, yeah, it opened a massive can of worms really,” she says.

That can of worms eventually led Gardner to Sherman Silber, a surgeon at the Infertility Center of St. Louis. Silber offers women a procedure that he claims will basically put their biological clocks on ice.

“It stops the clock, which is an incredible power to have,” Gardner says. “You know, the biological clock is every woman’s demon, really.”

What Silber offers is a surgical procedure that removes part or all of an ovary so it can be frozen and then transplanted back when a woman is ready to try to have children. Read full article.

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IVF method linked to size of babies

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The way in which embryos are prepared during in vitro fertilization may  influence the size of the baby that’s born, a new study from Finland suggests.

Embryos that spend long periods growing in culture (around five to six days) before being transferred to the mother’s womb are more likely to be born heavier than normal for their gestational age, compared to embryos that spend a shorter period in culture (two to three days), the study found. (Gestational age refers to how far along a pregnancy is.)

On the flip side, embryos that spend long periods in culture are less likely to be born small for their gestational age, the researchers said.

Previous studies have shown babies born as a result of  IVF treatment are at an increased risk for preterm birth and low birth weight. Factors related to the pregnancy, or to the IVF technique itself, may be responsible for the association. Few studies have looked at the effect of culture time on the baby’s birth weight, however.

Still, additional, larger studies are needed to confirm the new findings, the researchers said. Read full article.

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For Menopausal Women, Obesity Can Increase Cancer Risk

brigitte

Thanksgiving dinner has turkey and cranberry sauce along with pumpkin pie. Christmas rings in the end of the year with egg nog and ginger bread cookies. During the holiday season, it can be difficult to resist these delicious treats. However, a new study shows that it may be better to avoid these tempting dishes and strike out on a more nutritious diet, particularly if you happen to be a middle-aged woman.

Researchers from the University of Colorado Cancer Center recently revealed that maintaining a healthy lifestyle during menopause could help reduce the risk of breast cancer later on.

To begin, females who are obese and postmenopausal have a greater risk of later developing breast cancer. They also found that the cancer that these women get can be more aggressive than for their healthier counterparts. The findings of the study were recently featured in the journal Cancer Research.

The team of investigators was interested in exploring ways of limiting the risk for breast cancer.

“By using nutrient tracers for fat and sugar, we tracked where the body stored excess calories. In lean models, excess fat and glucose were taken up by the liver, mammary and skeletal tissues. In obese models, excess fat and glucose were taken up by tumors, fueling their growth,” explained the study’s lead author Erin Giles, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cancer Center, in a prepared statement. Read full article.

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Religious organizations win, lose in contraception mandate cases

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Two church-affiliated schools scored a victory and a Christian-owned chain store was handed a costly defeat this week in their separate ongoing legal battle against the Obama administration’s contraception mandate.

On Thursday, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver upheld a lower court ruling that denied a request by arts and crafts chain store Hobby Lobby to temporarily block enforcement of the mandate. The denial could cost the company up to $1.3 million in daily fines if it doesn’t provide a controversial contraceptive drug through its employees’ insurance plan.

That ruling comes two days after the Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., reinstated the lawsuits filed by Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina andWheaton College in Illinois and ordered the government to make good on its promise to draft new rules that could resolve the legal standoff between church-owned schools and hospitals and the Obama administration.

The ruling “turned a page here by adding a new level of supervision to hold the government responsible for the promise it made,” said Kyle Duncan, general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents the two church-affiliated schools. Read full article.

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New study shows how mitochondrial disease may be prevented

brigitte

A joint team of scientists from The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Laboratory and Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) has developed a technique that may prevent the inheritance of mitochondrial diseases in children. The study is published online today in Nature.

Dieter Egli, PhD, and Daniel Paull, PhD, of the NYSCF Laboratory with Mark Sauer, MD, and Michio Hirano, MD, of CUMC demonstrated how the nucleus of a cell can be successfully transferred between human egg cells. This landmark achievement carries significant implications for those children who have the potential to inherit mitochondrial diseases. Mitochondria are cellular organelles responsible for the maintenance and growth of a cell. They contain their own set of genes, passed from mother to child, and are inherited independently from the cell’s nucleus. Although mitochondrial DNA accounts for only 37 out of more than 20,000 genes in an individual, mutations to mitochondrial genes carry harmful effects.

Mitochondrial disorders, due to mutations in mitochondrial DNA, affect approximately 1 in 10,000 people, while nearly 1 in 200 individuals carries mutant mitochondrial DNA. Symptoms, manifesting most often in childhood, may lead to stunted growth, kidney disease, muscle weakness, neurological disorders, loss of vision and hearing, and respiratory problems, among others. Worldwide, a child is born with a mitochondrial disease approximately every 30 minutes, and there are currently no cures for these devastating diseases. “Through this study, we have shown that it should be possible to prevent the inheritance of mitochondrial disorders,” said Egli, PhD, co-author of the study and an Senior Researcher in the NYSCF Laboratory. “We hope that this technique can be advanced quickly toward the clinic where studies in humans can show how the use of this process could help to prevent mitochondrial disease.” In this study, the researchers removed the nucleus of an unfertilized egg cell and replaced it with the nucleus of another donor’s egg cell. The resultant egg cell contained the genome of the donor but not her mitochondrial DNA. The researchers demonstrated that the transfer did not have detectable adverse effects on the egg cell, a prerequisite for clinical translation. They achieved this by lowering the temperature of the egg before nuclear transfer, a novel technique. Previous studies report adverse consequences in approximately 50% of the egg cells. Read full article.

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Men With Lots of Brothers Are More Fertile, Have Faster Swimming Sperm

brigitte

Looking for Mr. Right to start a big family with? Science says you should start by counting how many brothers he has.

Scientists say that the more brothers a man has, the greater his baby-making potential, after discovering a link between the swimming speed of a man’s sperm with the number of male siblings in his family.

The latest findings, published in the Asian Journal of Andrology, add to a previous theory that parents with genes for good male fertility are more likely to have boys. If the theory is correct, it seems Americans have excellent male fertility genes. According to the latest report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more boys than girls are being born in the United States, and there were exactly 94,232 more male births than female births in the U.S. in 2004.

Researchers at the University of Sheffield compared the traveling speed of 500 men with their family make-up.

The study found that the greater number of brothers rather than sisters a man has, the faster his sperm, and faster sperm is associated with greater fertility. Researchers noted that having mostly brothers can also indicate that the man’s parents have strong male fertility genes and that they could have passed it on to him.

“The results are very surprising and could provide genetic insights into why some men are more fertile than others but at the moment have no clinical relevance to how we might manage and treat male infertility,” researcher Dr. Allan Pacey, of the University of Sheffield, said in a statement. Read full article.

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Menopause linked to higher brain aneurysm risk

brigitte

LOS ANGELES (KABC) — They sit silently in the heads of millions of Americans. They can burst without warning. Brain aneurysms rupture in about 30,000 people every year, killing or disabling many.

Women are at a higher risk for aneurysms than men. Now, researchers are taking a closer look at how a major change in a woman’s life could be to blame.

Sande Skinner thought she was having a stroke.

“The left side of my body got numb,” said Skinner. “It didn’t feel right.”

Skinner had a giant aneurysm right behind her right optic nerve. If ruptured, brain aneurysms can lead to stroke or death. Risk factors include smoking, high blood pressure and possibly lower estrogen levels caused by menopause. Two of the largest brain aneurysm trials in the world found most happen in menopausal women.

“Average age of rupture of all patients with aneurysms is age 52, which just so happens to be the average age of menopause,” said Dr. Dr. Michael Chen, a neurointerventionalist at Rush University Medical Center. Read full article.

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Et Tu, Pelvic Exams?

brigitte

First, let’s review. We’ve been getting a lot of updates to cancer screening tests lately.

Pap Smears, a screening test for cervical cancer, were recommended to be done annually, until a group of experts in prevention concluded that every three years was equally effective. Most medical groups, including the American Cancer Society, agree on this one.

Then there’s mammography. I think everyone knows the debate around that. Every year orevery other year? Starting at 40? or 50? The evidence points to every two years after age 50, although many doctors maintain younger and more often is better.

But this latest one — about pelvic exams — caught me by surprise. It turns out there’s really not a whole lot of evidence that doing an annual pelvic exam makes any difference to a healthy woman’s continuing good health. (Again, we’re stressing healthy women. Women having symptoms are definitely candidates for a pelvic exam). Read full article.

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Global rates of infertility remain unchanged over past two decades

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In 2010, almost 50 million couples worldwide were unable to have a child after five years of trying. Infertility rates have hardly changed over the past 20 years, according to a study by international researchers published in this week’s PLOS Medicine.

In an analysis of 277 national surveys, the authors, led by Gretchen Stevens from the World Health Organization, estimated the levels and trends of infertility in 190 countries from 1990 to 2010. They found that in 2010, 1.9% of women aged 20 years who wanted to have children were unable to have their first live birth (primary infertility), and 10.5% of women who had previously given birth were unable to have another baby (secondary infertility)—a total of 48.5 million couples. The authors found that the levels of infertility were similar in 1990 and 2010, with only a slight overall decrease in primary infertility (0.1%, but with a more pronounced drop in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia) and a small increase in secondary infertility (0.4%). The authors found that primary infertility rates among women wanting to have children also varied by region, ranging from 1.5% in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2010, to 2.6% in North Africa and the Middle East. Furthermore, with a few exceptions, global and country patterns of secondary infertility were similar to those of primary infertility. Read full article.

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Hugh Jackman: Our Infertility Battle Was a ‘Difficult Time’

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He may be one of the most doting dads in Hollywood, but thepath to parenthood was a difficult one for Hugh Jackman.

Before the actor and his wife Deborra-Lee Furness welcomed Oscar Maximillian, 12, and Ava Eliot, 7, through adoption, they fought a long battle with infertility, undergoing IVF treatments only to have the resulting pregnancies end in miscarriages.

“It is a difficult time. The miscarriage thing — apparently it happens to one in three pregnancies — but it’s very, very rarely talked about,” Jackman, 44, said during a Tuesday appearance on Katie.

“It’s almost secretive. But it’s a good thing to talk about. It’s more common and it’s tough, there’s a grieving process you have to go through.”

Now the adoring dad of a son and daughter, the Les Miserables star says adoption was never a last resort; It has always been a part of the couple’s parenting plans.

“To be clear, Deb and I always wanted to adopt,” he explains. “We didn’t know where in the process that would happen, but biologically, obviously, we tried and it was not happening for us.” Read full article.