Tag: reproductive health

Fertility Clock Headlines, Fertility Headlines

New women’s health benefits go into effect

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WASHINGTON, Aug. 1 (UPI) — New U.S. health insurance plans are required beginning Wednesday to provide new preventive benefits at no cost to covered women as part of healthcare reform.

The new rules require insurers to cover a comprehensive set of preventive services that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates will benefit 47 million women. They include contraceptives, breastfeeding supplies and gestational diabetes screening for pregnant women, prenatal care, routine breast and pelvic exams and pap tests used to detect potentially precancerous and cancerous processes in the cervix.

Other benefits that became effective Wednesday as part of a decade-long rollout of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed into law by President Barack Obama March 23, 2010, include testing for the human papillomavirus — which can cause warts and, in a minority of cases, lead to cervical cancers — screening and counseling for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases and infections, and screening and counseling for domestic and interpersonal violence.

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New OB/GYN Guidelines Urge Annual Wellness Visits

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Obstetricians and gynecologists want women to keep coming to them for annual exams, even though women are no longer advised to get yearly Pap tests to screen for cervical cancer.

In new guidelines published Monday, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists makes the case for an annual “well-woman” visit and continues to recommend annual pelvic exams for women older than age 21. But the doctors’ group also says “no evidence supports or refutes,” the value of the internal exam for finding signs of cancer or other problems in women with no symptoms. So the final decision is up to women and their doctors, the group says.

The guidelines come a few months after it, the American Cancer Society, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and several other groups said most women need a Pap smear only every three years, starting at age 21, and can get them even less frequently after age 30 if they also get tests for the cancer-causing human papillomavirus. Women with no history of problems can stop Pap tests at 65, the groups say.

But a Pap smear, in which cells are scraped from the cervix, is not a pelvic exam and a pelvic exam is just part of a preventive visit, the gynecologists’ group says.

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STC Teen Pregnancy report

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26 JUNE 2012 | LONDON – A new report from Save the Children UK – Every Woman’s Right: How Family Planning Saves Lives – highlights the fact that girls under 15 are five times more likely to die in pregnancy than women in their 20s. Babies born to younger mums are also at far greater risk and around one million babies born to adolescent girls die every year – babies are 60% more likely to die if their mother is under 18.

Read the full report Listen to the BBC Today programme’s Sarah Montague talking to pregnant teenagers at one STC clinic in Liberia

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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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Secondary Infertility: An Unexpected Diagnosis

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For a woman who has already conceived and given birth to a child, or even several children, the diagnosis of secondary infertility can be a bewildering and disorienting experience. According to the Centers for Disease Control, infertility affects approximately 5.3 million Americans; one out of ten married couples are facing some form of infertility issue, whether it’s the quest for their first child or adding additional children to their family.

For Leigh Kenyon (not her real name), disbelief colored her inability to conceive following the birth of her first child. “When my daughter was two, I miscarried my second pregnancy in the first trimester. When we tried again, I simply couldn’t get pregnant.”

As Leigh and many others have discovered, because it’s called “secondary,” (which means you’ve conceived in the past regardless if the outcome was a live birth, still birth, abortion or loss of pregnancy to miscarriage), your anxiety may not be taken seriously. The “proof” of her previous fertility kept Leigh from following up on her concerns as she struggled to make sense of the disparity between what her body was telling her and the reassurance offered by others. “I worried that something was wrong, but friends, family and even my OB kept telling me to relax, not to be in such a rush since I was obviously able to get pregnant. Even I assumed I must be able to conceive since I had done so twice before.”

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Infertility In Your 20s: Getting Diagnosed When You Should Be In Your ‘Fertility Peak’

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Olivia Tullo was 28 when she and her husband decided to start a family. They’d bought a house; they had a puppy. They were ready.

“We started trying, and several months went by. I just had a feeling,” Tullo said. “I just knew something wasn’t right.”

Her OB-GYN recommended a fertility specialist, who eventually recommended surgery for what was determined to be endometriosis. After that, there was more trying, more tests and the discovery that she had premature ovarian failure.

“My ovaries were shutting down,” Tullo said. “And I was only 29.”

Age is one of the main factors that can drive up a woman’s risk of infertility, which affects approximately 10 percent of women between the ages of 15 to 44. By 40, a woman’s chances of becoming pregnant drop from 90 to 67 percent; at 45, a woman has just a 15 percent shot.

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Birth Control Tied To Heart Attack And Stroke, But Risks Very Small, Study Says

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A sweeping new Danish study concludes that hormonal contraception increases the risk of heart attack and stroke, but the overall risk for individual women is very low.

“The amount of attention paid to these minuscule risks, and what are likely to be very small differences in vascular risk, detracts attention from more salient issues, like preventing unwanted pregnancy,” argued Dr. Diana B. Petitti, a professor of biomedical informatics at Arizona State University. Petitti wrote an editorial accompanying the findings, which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday.

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Unhealthy Lifestyle May Not Affect Sperm Count

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Men who smoke or drink or even do drugs may not be jeopardizing their fertility, says new study. Researchers say that unhealthy lifestyle might not affect the swimming sperms men produce.

“Despite lifestyle choices being important for other aspects of our health, our results suggest that many lifestyle choices probably have little influence on how many swimming sperm they ejaculate. For example, whether the man was a current smoker or not was of little importance. The proportion of men who had low numbers of swimming sperm was similar whether they had never been a smoker or a smoker who was currently smoking more than 20 cigarettes a day. Similarly, there was little evidence of any risk associated with alcohol consumption,” said Dr. Andrew Povey from the University of Manchester’s School of Community Based Medicine.

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Egg freezing technique could be ‘game changer’ for would-be parents

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Commerce Township — Soon after Julie and Bill VanDerworp got married in 1993, they started trying to have a baby. Although she was 27 and he was 30, the young couple was unable to conceive a child.

Eventually they tried fertility drugs and procedures. Still, no baby.

As the years passed, they tried conceiving with an egg donor. But it wasn’t until they turned to a donor whose eggs had been frozen with new technology that she finally got pregnant. Late last year, after spending nearly $200,000 and trying for more than a decade, the VanDerworps gave birth to a son they named Kent.

“It’s been such a long journey, such a long road,” Julie VanDerworp said. “But I still can’t believe my luck. (Having Kent) is everything I thought it would be. It’s so rewarding.”

The VanDerworps got the frozen egg from a donor in Michigan’s first “egg bank” — made possible by a reproductive technology that allows women to freeze their eggs so they can bear children later in life or after a cancer treatment, which typically leaves women infertile. The egg bank also can be used by women who are either infertile, like VanDerworp, or struggle with genetic issues they don’t want their children to inherit by using an egg that’s been donated by another woman.

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Can Diseases Make You Infertile?

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What is infertility? Well there is no reason to think that you are infertile as you could not conceive just after trying for just a few times. Infertility can be explained as the biological inability to conceive even after trying for a long time. Some diseases cause infertility in both men and women.

In some cases, infertility issues are caused due to the male partner. In other cases it is due the female and in some cases due to both. Infertility is not always caused due poor lifestyle or sexual habits. Here we are listing down some diseases that can cause infertility in you or your partner.

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