Tag: fertility clock

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Estrogen therapy may fight early Alzheimer’s

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brandWomen 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.

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How TV Shows Handle Menopause

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Menopause in the MediaOne of the things that grabbed me most about the new Netflix House of Cards—other than the fact that I watched all 13 episodes in a 24-hour span—was the superb performance by Robin Wright. As Rep. Francis Underwood’s intensely focused wife, Claire, Wright managed to convey ruthlessness and driving ambition while also suggesting that Claire was questioning some of her life choices, especially when it came to love and romance. But since Claire is the sort of woman who is slow to trust and share, Wright had to express this inner turmoil in a guarded, coded way.

There’s a transactional quality to many of Claire’s relationships—much of her social life revolves around stage-managed appearances alongside her politician husband or fundraisers for the nonprofit she runs. And so she doesn’t open up with many people. Still, it’s striking how utterly reluctant she is to acknowledge the hot flashes she appears to experience early in the show. A female friend who notices her lingering for longer than is strictly necessary in front of the refrigerator tries to start a conversation about hot flashes and night sweats, but Claire simply changes the subject. Later, Francis brings up the same refrigerator pause, in what seems to be an attempt to shake Claire’s steely composure. Read full article.

 

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For menopause, estrogen fears overblown

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FertilityClock_WebMillions of women are needlessly suffering from the effects of menopause: the intrusive hot flashes, night sweats and wet linens; the inability to fall back asleep in the middle of the night; “brain fog”; and depression, as well as the negative impact on one’s love life (loss of interest, dryness and actual pain).

All these symptoms and more could be relieved by replacing lost estrogen. Yet many women – and their doctors – are paralyzed with fear about the safety of hormones.

We are living in the long shadow of negative press that surrounded the initial release of the Women’s Health Initiative study results. Ten years ago, media reports suggested that rates of breast cancer, stroke and heart disease were unacceptably high in hormone users (equine estrogen and synthetic progesterone) compared with those women who were taking the placebo (dummy pill). The study was stopped prematurely after five years.

However, early results of estrogen-alone trials involving women with a hysterectomy, published two years later with little media attention, showed lower rates of heart disease, diabetes in women under 60 and breast cancer in all age groups. Yes, lower rates of breast cancer. Read full article.

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Nigeria: ‘By Freezing Their Eggs, Women Can Extend Their Fertility’

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Miranda, a 29-year-old mother of two has just had her eggs frozen and stored. The decision was not by chance but by choice, she told Good Health Weekly last week at her Lagos home.

Miranda is one of the fast growing group of Nigerian women who opt for egg freezing and storage for the pupose of bearing children in future. The decision to take this revolutionary step was borne out of necessity.

She was diagnosed with cervical cancer last year and hopes to continue to bear children from the frozen eggs as soon as she completes the series of radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatment.

Biologically, a woman’s fertility declines in her 30s. Thanks to egg freezing, the ticking biological clock can be quietened.

The origins of egg freezing in fertility treatment go back to the late 60s, with experiments on mice.

The first successful pregnancy from a frozen egg occurred in 1986, in Australia. But while the procedure was developed by doctors to help cancer patients and women at risk of an early menopause, however, fertility experts believe that more and more women flocking to fertility clinics in Nigeria may be doing so more for medically advised reasons than for social reasons. Read full article.

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Lesser known causes may come into play for couples battling infertility

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AUSTIN — Infertility is a common problem among many couples trying to have children. Sometimes the causes are well known, but frequently the cause can be surprising.

Candace Biersmith was in her late-30’s when she and her husband decided it was time to have children.

“My husband and I had actually been together 18 years,” she said. “It was something we really didn’t decide until we got into our late 30’s to have children. We thought we would just be one of those couples that didn’t have children and traveled. That was something I really had to think about it and decide that I didn’t want to live my life and not have children.”

After a year and a half of trying without success, Biersmith knew the clock was ticking.

“Being an older female I did want to check into seeing what my options were, because I didn’t have five to 10 years to wait for it happen on its own,” Biersmith said.

So Biersmith made an appointment with Dr. Thomas Vaughn — a fertility specialist– with the Texas Fertility Center. Vaughn explained a variety of things can negatively impact a couple’s fertility, some known, some not so well known.  Read full article.

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Aging Sperm? Not the End of the World

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Judith Shulevitz’s recent New Republic essay on how later parenthood is “upending American society” claims that delaying kids could lead us down a rabbit hole of genetic decline. The piece gathers much of its energy from new studies suggesting that male sperm quality decays with age.

While female infertility is old news (literally), issues with male fertility create a new cultural frisson. Apparently, genetic errors may be introduced into sperm every time they divide—which is often. So the children of some older men may have issues, cognitive and physical, that the kids of younger men don’t generally face (at least not due to their dad’s contribution to their DNA).

There’s a lot of emphasis on the word “may” in the New Republic piece—since most of the evidence it’s based on is inconclusive. And there’s a strong element of anecdote as well. Fertility catastrophizing is an ongoing sport. For instance, here are some other fertility scaremongering pieces of the past few years which turned out to be not the big problems the headlines suggested: the ovarian reserve scare; the later-parenthood autism scare; the childlessness scare; earlier this month we had the low-birth-rate scare (which turns out to really be about young women delaying kids in order to establish themselves—atime-lag effect). Read full article.

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Chance To Pause Biological Clock With Ovarian Transplant Stirs Debate

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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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Menopause linked to higher brain aneurysm risk

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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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Why do women get hot flashes during menopause?

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Hot flushes affect millions of people, and not just women. Yet, it is still unclear what causes the episodes of temperature discomfort, often accompanied by profuse sweating.

Now a team of researchers around Dr. Naomi Rance, a professor in the department of pathology at the UA College of Medicine, has come closer to understanding the mechanism of hot flushes, a necessary step for potential treatment options down the road. This research was published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team identified a group of brain cells known as KNDy neurons as a likely control switch of hot flushes. KNDy neurons (pronounced “candy”) are located in the hypothalamus, a portion of the brain controlling vital functions that also serves as the switchboard between the central nervous system and hormone signals.

“Although the KNDy neurons are a very small population of cells, our research reveals that they play extremely important roles in how the body controls its energy resources, reproduction and temperature,” said Melinda Mittelman-Smith, who led the study as part of her doctoral thesis. “They are true multitaskers.”

By studying KNDy neurons in rats, the research team created an animal model of menopause to elucidate the biological mechanisms of temperature control in response to withdrawal of the hormone estrogen, the main trigger of the changes that go along with menopause. Read full article.

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Predicting the age at menopause of women having suffered from childhood cancers

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This study provided important data about the fertility window of women who had suffered from childhood cancer and information concerning the associated risk factors, but did not confirm the greater risk of premature menopause (before the age of 40) that was reported by the American studies.

The results were published in the review Human Reproduction of November 15.

Women who have suffered from childhood cancer are known to run a greater risk of premature menopause. However, data about the associated risk factors is limited. Researchers from unit 1018 “Centre for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health (CESP)” (Inserm/Université Paris-Sud/Institut Gustave Roussy) and from the AP-HP analyzed the data from a French cohort, named Euro2k, concerning 1522 survivors of childhood cancer diagnosed between 1945 and 1986 when they were under 18, initially in order to study the mortality rate. The study estimated the radiation doses received at the ovaries by the women in this cohort who had been treated by radiotherapy. 706 of these women filled in a detailed questionnaire about their state of health. 32% of these women had already reached the age of 40 years; 7% were over 50 years of age. The research team studied the age at menopause of these women and the potentially associated risk factors. The researchers based this study on self-reported questionnaires sent to the women in order to obtain information about the menopause, without confirming by measuring FSH levels.

Analysis of this data showed that 97 women (13,7%) were menopaused at a median age of 44 years, in other words, 7 years earlier than the general population. For a third of these women (36%), menopause was surgically induced. Read full article.