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Moderate Drinking May Help Older Women’s Bones

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July 11, 2012 — Women who drink alcohol moderately may be doing their bones a favor, new research suggests.

“Moderate alcohol as a component of a healthy lifestyle that includes a balanced diet and physical activity may lower the risk of osteoporosis,” researcher Urszula Iwaniec, PhD, associate professor at Oregon State University, tells WebMD.

The study is small, with only 40 women, she cautions, and the research needs to be repeated in larger groups to see if the findings hold up.

The women in the study averaged 1.4 drinks a day. More than 90% were wine drinkers, Iwaniec tells WebMD.

The study is published in the journal Menopause: The Journal of the North American Menopause Society.

Drinking and Bone Health: Study Details

In the past, other research has found a link between moderate drinking and bone health, as measured by bone density, Iwaniec says. However, it has not been shown definitely that alcohol itself helps the bones or that the benefit is due to other factors.

Her team evaluated healthy women who were in early menopause, not on hormone therapy, and drank only moderately. Their average age was 56 and they had no history of fractures related to osteoporosis.

Bones are constantly remodeling, with old bone being removed and replaced. Estrogen helps keep this bone remodeling process in good balance.

As women go through menopause and estrogen declines, they are at risk of decreased bone density and getting osteoporosis.

The researchers took blood samples at the study start and computed the levels of indicators of bone turnover.

Next, the researchers asked the women to abstain from all alcohol for two weeks and took blood samples again.

After two weeks, the rate of bone removal and replacement increased. “That means that bone turnover is increased, and increased bone turnover is an independent risk factor for fractures [in older women],” Iwaniec says.

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Schools failing to teach pupils about infertility

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Why doesn’t sex education cover infertility, when five children in every class are likely to experience it?

For a group of teenagers, Lauren, Fazana, Flora and Mackenzie are remarkably knowledgeable about fertility. Sitting in the library at St Marylebone school in central London, they’re explaining what they’ve learned. These year 10 girls know how common infertility is, how female fertility declines with age and they understand that IVF doesn’t always work. The discussion ranges from egg donation and surrogacy through to the dilemmas they know they may face later in life trying to balance careers with the desire for a family; “There’s never a time that’s exactly the right time to have a baby,” they explain.

It’s something every girl at St Marylebone will cover in their religious studies lessons, where the curriculum covers religious attitudes to family, relationships and family planning, as well as the ethics of fertility treatments. But in some other schools this highly topical issue barely gets a mention. IVF may be covered as a technological advance in science, but infertility isn’t part of the sex education curriculum, where the focus is on preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. This may seem sensible when dealing with young people, but the reality is that pupils are far more likely to have a fertility problem in the future than they are to get pregnant while they’re still at school. The teenage pregnancy rates for England and Wales are the lowest they’ve been since the 1960s, but infertility rates are rising; one in six of the population will experience problems getting pregnant – that’s about five pupils in each class of 30.

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Menopause and Marketing, Do Women Need Freshening?

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Menopause should mean fewer trips to the feminine hygiene aisle, right?

Not if Kimberly-Clark has its way. The company is about to extend its Poise line of products for women of a certain age. Included: a lubricant for vaginal dryness, cooling towelettes and a roll-on gel for hot flashes, and panty “fresheners” and a “vaginal wash” for vaginal odor — all addressing what the company says are common problems in over-40 women. The line already includes panty liners for women with “light bladder leakage.”

The theme of the marketing campaign: “The Second Talk” — meaning a talk about menopause equivalent to the one young girls get about their periods.

“There’s not a lot of conversation happening about menopause,” a company official tells the Associated Press.

Never mind “Menopause the Musical” or the decade-long debate about hormone therapy for hot flashes. It’s probably true that women don’t do a lot of chatting about vaginal dryness (though lubricants, moisturizers and estrogen products have long been available for that problem). And those cooling towels sound harmless enough (though not as nice as having fewer hot flashes in the first place — something an encouraging new study suggests many women might do by losing weight).

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Ovary transplant could put menopause ‘on ice’

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Women will be able to give birth in old age following an ovary transplant breakthrough that means they can postpone menopause until well after their 50s.

The technique to remove parts of an ovary, store them for decades and then transplant them, could effectively put menopause “on ice”, doctors have said. Only physical ability to carry a baby would prevent women from becoming mothers, meaning they would no longer have to think about the “biological clock”.

A conference in Istanbul was told that 28 babies had been born to infertile women who had ovary tissue transplants, and that most of the children were conceived naturally without the need for IVF or drugs.

Dr Sherman Silber, an American surgeon who has been involved in transplants for 11 women at a hospital in St Louis, Missouri, said: “A woman born today has a 50 per cent chance of living to 100. That means they are going to be spending half of their lives post-menopause.

“You could have grafts removed as a young woman and then have the first replaced as you approach menopausal age. You could then put a slice back every decade.

“Some women might want to go through the menopause, but others might not.”

Scientists said the treatment could also have health benefits, by avoiding the increased risk of osteoporosis and heart disease linked to menopause. They admitted, however, it may raise the risk of breast and womb cancer.

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15 Top Medical Organizations Agree on Hormone Therapy Use; 10 Years Have Passed Since Women’s Health Initiative Raised Questions

ASRM News and Research

After 10 years of debate regarding the risks and benefits of hormone therapy, 15 top medical organizations have come together to issue a statement of agreement regarding the benefits of hormone therapy for symptomatic menopausal women.

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Hormone Therapy Undergoes 10-Year Review

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A systematic review of nine randomized, placebo-controlled trials published to assess the effectiveness of menopausal hormone therapy in the prevention of chronic conditions revealed: estrogen plus progestin and estrogen alone decreased risk for fractures but increased risk for stroke, thromboembolic events, gallbladder disease, and urinary incontinence; estrogen plus progestin increased risk for breast cancer and probable dementia; and estrogen alone decreased risk for breast cancer.

At one time, menopausal hormone therapy was routinely used by postmenopausal women to prevent cardiovascular disease, dementia, osteoporosis and other chronic conditions. However, once initial results of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) trials emerged in 2002 indicating important adverse health effects of this treatment, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) issued recommendations against using hormone therapy to prevent chronic conditions for estrogen plus progestin in 2002, and for estrogen only in 2005.

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How to Find Reliable Menopause Information Online

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Seventy-two percent of women have not received any treatment for menopausal symptoms, according to recent study conducted by Lake Research Partners for the Endocrine Society.

Of those polled, 45 percent said they thought current available information was confusing and 41 percent weren’t sure what to trust.

There are over 10 million menopause websites, many with misinformation about menopause, treatment options, tests, and strategies.

How do we find reliable menopause information online so we can have a productive conversation with our health care providers?

Different types of information are provided by a variety of websites: unbiased sites from scientific organizations, commercial sites with medically reviewed content, hospital sites, online health news, blogs and communities.

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Menopausal women could ‘work out’ their hot flashes

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Menopausal women who exercise may experience fewer hot flashes in the 24 hours following physical activity, according to health researchers.

In general, women who are relatively inactive or are overweight or obese tend to have a risk of increased symptoms of perceived hot flashes, noted Steriani Elavsky, assistant professor of kinesiology at Penn State.

Perceived hot flashes do not always correspond to actual hot flashes. Most previous research analyzed only self-reported hot flashes. This is the first study known to the researchers to look at objective versus subjective hot flashes.

Elavsky and colleagues studied 92 menopausal women for 15 days. The women recruited for this study were different from many earlier menopause studies, said Elavsky. In the past, women in menopause studies were experiencing severe symptoms and seeking help. They were probably not representative of the general population.

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Drs. OZ and Roizen: Relieve menopausal symptoms

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Like the wildfires sweeping New Mexico, menopause can leave women feeling scorched and doused. Hot flashes, heart palpitations and brain fog can make daily life challenging.

Unfortunately, alarms about hormone therapy have scared many women away from a treatment that banishes symptoms. An update by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force suggests estrogen, alone or taken with progesterone, increases the risk for stroke, blood clots, and gallbladder and urinary problems. While they DO admit the recommendations don’t apply to women thinking about HT for menopausal symptoms, or those who have had a hysterectomy before age 50, they make women hesitant to take advantage of the benefits…

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Doctor’s advice: early menopause

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DR Cindy Pan sheds light on how to manage your physical and emotional health during premature menopause.

** Question: I am 38 and have been diagnosed with premature menopause. I am very distressed and wonder how this could have happened. I am struggling to cope with the physical, mental and emotional symptoms of menopause in addition to the sense of grief, loss and change in identity. Please help.

— Answer: It is understandable for a woman to feel devastated with the diagnosis of premature menopause. It is, of course, not simply symptoms of hot flushes, vaginal dryness, mood swings, irritability, dry skin, eyes and mouth, sleep disturbance and decreased sex drive that can be distressing, but also the loss of fertility that can have a massive impact.

This is particularly evident if the woman has not yet had children. That said, IVF using donor eggs is an option some women with premature menopause choose to explore.

About one per cent of women experience premature menopause, which is defined as cessation of ovulation and menstruation before 40. It can occur as early as the teens or early 20s. In most cases, the reasons for it are not known, but sometimes there may be an association with an autoimmune condition (such as hypothyroidism, Graves’ disease, Crohn’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis or lupus), a genetic condition or family history.

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