Infertility Options
Six months ago, Slayton Haney was like so many other twenty-somethings fresh out of college: newly on her own and just settling into her life and career as an adult. After graduating from Florida State University in 2011 with a degree in finance, she got a job as an accountant at the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando, where she moved in with a friend from school. Life was good.
Then, in May, Haney felt something in her breast. A lump. Read full article.
STOCKHOLM — Two Swedish women are carrying the wombs of their mothers after what doctors called the world’s first mother-to-daughter uterus transplants.
Specialists at the University of Goteborg completed the surgery over the weekend without complications, but say they won’t consider the procedures successful unless the women achieve pregnancy after their observation period ends a year from now.
“We are not going to call it a complete success until this results in children,” said Michael Olausson, one of the Swedish surgeons told The Associated Press. “That’s the best proof.” Read full article.
WEDNESDAY, Sept. 19 (HealthDay News) — Women who experience early menopause may face double the risk of heart disease and stroke, according to a new study.
This increased risk is true across different ethnic backgrounds and is independent of traditional heart disease and stroke risk factors, the researchers said.
The study included more than 2,500 women, aged 45 to 84, who were followed for between six and eight years. Twenty-eight percent of the women reported early menopause, which occurs before the age of 46. Read full article.
This month is the 50th anniversary of the publication of “Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson’s landmark book calling attention to the harmful effects of chemical pesticides, specifically DDT. She charged that pesticides caused food contamination, cancer, genetic defects and the elimination of entire species.
In a CBS documentary, Carson said, “Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.” Read full article.
HONG KONG (Reuters) – Women in Asia are largely ignorant about fertility problems and tend to blame their failure to conceive on “God’s will” and bad luck, a survey has found.
The survey, which covered 1,000 women in 10 countries who had been trying to conceive for at least six months, found that 62 percent of them did not suspect they may have a fertility problem.
They were even less likely to point the finger at their husbands, with 80 percent of them not suspecting that their partners may have a problem with fertility.
Infertility is defined by the World Health Organisation as the inability to conceive after a year of regular, unprotected sex. But only 43 percent of the women surveyed knew that. Read full article.
Ishrat Hussain says she locked herself in her room when she learned she could not conceive.
Two years after her wedding and still not pregnant, the 26-year-old visited a gynecologist, who diagnosed her with polycystic ovary syndrome, an endocrine disorder that can cause women to stop ovulating, gain unusual weight, develop irregular periods or skin problems and grow abnormal facial and body hair.
Hussain struggles to describe how people ridiculed her in her community in Kashmir, where infertility is taboo.
“An infertile woman is generally viewed as incomplete with a notion of having a curse bestowed for some misdeed,” she says tearfully.
Dr. Ashraf Ganaie, an endocrinologist at Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, says plenty of other women share Hussain’s problem amid the decades-old conflict and related uncertainties of life in the Kashmir Valley, a disputed territory between India and Pakistan.
He says an unpublished study that he supervised attributed 90 percent of infertility cases in the valley to polycystic ovary syndrome and related diseases, 5 percent to premature ovarian failure and another 5 percent to other stressors in life.
“In the last few years, we have received more than 150 women who suffer from premature ovarian failure,” he says.
Clinical psychologist Iram Nazir says that stress can negatively affect women’s hormonal levels. Read full article.
Views held by Paul Ryan – the man chosen by US presidential hopeful Mitt Romney to be his running mate – that life begins at fertilisation have caused a media furore in North America.
Ryan is a co-sponsor of the Sanctity of Human Life Act, which has been reintroduced to the House of Representatives and that states ‘human life shall be deemed to begin with fertilisation’.
Under the proposed law, embryos discarded during IVF would become ‘murder victims’, commented US political magazine Mother Jones. The magazine said, if it became law, the Act ‘would make Romney’s kids criminals’ since three of them have relied on IVF treatment in order to become parents.
During IVF multiple embryos are often created that may not all be implanted during one cycle of treatment. These ‘spare’ embryos can either be frozen and stored for future use, used by other prospective parents, used in research, or destroyed.
If passed, the Sanctity of Human Life Act would ‘criminalise IVF’, said The Daily Beast, a US news and opinion website – something which Amy Goodman in the Guardian reflected on: ‘As reported in Mother Jones, this law would make normal IVF practices illegal’, she said.
However, other journalists are calling much of the attention ‘bad reporting’, claiming that the media has distorted Ryan’s Act. There is no evidence that Ryan believes in criminalising IVF and that ‘efforts to imply otherwise in order to create a neat little conflict… are misleading and irresponsible’, Marni Soupcoff said in the Canadian National Post. Read full article.
MEDICAL experts are divided over two new studies that suggest that women who got pregnant after taking fertility drugs or treatments such as in In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) may have higher odds for breast cancer and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) later on in life.
A study published recently in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that women using ovulation-stimulating fertility drugs who were unable to get pregnant for at least 10 weeks had a lower risk of breast cancer disease than women who have not taken the drugs.
Another new study published recently in the Bulletin of the American Psychological Association suggests that women who undergo fertility treatments may find the situation so distressing that they develop PTSD. The findings suggest the definition of PTSD may need to be changed so that its causes include potentially traumatic experiences such as infertility.
But a fertility expert and joint pioneer of In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) in Nigeria, Prof. Oladapo Ashiru disagrees.
Ashiru, who is also the medical director of Medical Art Centre (MART), Ikeja, told The Guardian: “Most of these reports are still very controversial and lack merit in the research studies. Many of the studies from Australia to Europe and the United States of America (USA) are at the end regarded as speculative.”
Ashiru, however, said one aspect of breast cancer that is widely accepted is that a high proportion of breast cancer are due to the unopposed action of estrogen due to the absence of progesterone or an excessive production of estrogen as in obesity.
He explained: “A number of the fertility drugs that are used to cause multiple ovulations will also cause a rise in the circulating estrogen in the body. The risk is more if the individual used the fertility drugs to cause ovulation alone. In most fertility centers today, during the fertility treatment, progesterone is also introduced to help support the intended pregnancy especially in patients undergoing IVF treatment.”
“It, therefore, sounds to reason that the operative factor is estrogen. Most of the fertility treatment occurs in a balanced medium between estrogen and progesterone hence estrogen alone is not able to have its way since progesterone is administered externally.” Read full article.
Federal health officials took steps Thursday to head off the emergence of a new gonorrhea “superbug” that’s resistant to standard antibiotics.
Gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease that infects 700,000 Americans a year, already has become resistant to all but one class of antibiotics and could soon become untreatable, federal health officials warned. Doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new treatment guidelines, hoping to delay the inevitable day when standard drugs no longer work. The guidelines call for withholding a potent oral antibiotic now commonly used to treat the infection. Instead, doctors should use an injectable form to which the gonorrhea bacteria seems less likely to develop resistance, along with a second type of antibiotic pills.
“Gonorrhea for years has developed resistance to every antibiotic we’ve thrown at it,” says Kimberly Workowski, an infectious-disease expert at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.
Now, “we’re at the end of the line on standard therapies,” says P. Frederick Sparling, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Gonorrhea is a major cause of infertility among women. It increases the risk that people will be infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and that they will spread it to their partners, according to the CDC.
As recently as 2007, doctors could treat gonorrhea with a class of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones, which include the drug Ciprofloxacin, or Cipro. Now, those drugs no longer work for gonorrhea. Instead, doctors have turned to a class of drugs called cephalosporins, also used to treat serious conditions such as bacterial meningitis and salmonella poisoning, says Sparling.
Yet even these antibiotics may not be useful for long, he says. Read full article.
A dramatic increase in childhood obesity in recent decades may have impacts that go beyond the usual health concerns – it could be disrupting the timing of puberty and ultimately lead to a diminished ability to reproduce, especially in females.
A body of research suggests that obesity could be related to growing problems with infertility, scientists said in a recent review, in addition to a host of other physical and psycho-social concerns. The analysis was published in Frontiers in Endocrinology.
Human bodies may be scrambling to adjust to a problem that is fairly new. For thousands of years of evolution, poor nutrition or starvation were a greater concern, rather than an overabundance of food.
“The issue of so many humans being obese is very recent in evolutionary terms, and since nutritional status is important to reproduction, metabolic syndromes caused by obesity may profoundly affect reproductive capacity,” said Patrick Chappell, an assistant professor of veterinary medicine at Oregon State University and an author of the recent report.
“Either extreme of the spectrum, anorexia or obesity, can be associated with reproduction problems,” he said.
Researchers are still learning more about the overall impact of obesity on the beginning of puberty and effects on the liver, pancreas and other endocrine glands, Chappell said. While humans show natural variations in pubertal progression, the signals that control this timing are unclear.