Dear science: an appreciation
Dear science,
Today my sons, Oliver and Victor, are 15 years old.
It is not a miracle; it is thanks to you.
Unable to get pregnant I needed infertility therapy. If you had not isolated the hormones, developed tests, and then designed medications for ovarian stimulation and to trigger ovulation I would never have become pregnant.
If ultrasound had not been developed I would not have known I was pregnant with triplets and then what eventually happened next would likely have been even more of a catastrophe. It is sometimes hard to see how these kinds of things helped, but I have not forgotten. I know there is an orchestra inv...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - August 14, 2018 Category: General Medicine Authors: < a href="https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/post-author/jennifer-gunter" rel="tag" > Jennifer Gunter, MD < /a > Tags: Physician OB/GYN Pediatrics Source Type: blogs
The problem with ovarian functions tests
The chances of getting pregnant after IVF depend to a large extent on the quality of the woman's eggs, and this is why older women have lower pregnancy rates. This is why testing for ovarian reserve is so important, and we measure the AMH level as well as the antral follicle count , so we have some sense of how well the patient is going to respond to superovulation, and what her chances of getting good quality embryos is going to be.The trouble is that these numbers only provide an estimate of static ovarian reserve – they are not dynamic functional tests. What we really want to know is how the patient will respond ...
Source: Dr.Malpani's Blog - August 14, 2018 Category: Reproduction Medicine Source Type: blogs
Diet and age at menopause: Is there a connection?
This study does have limitations. For one, it relied on women to accurately remember what they ate in the past, and didn’t prove that the dietary differences actually caused the shifts in menopausal age.
In addition, it included only 900 women — the ones who began menopause — in its final analysis, and used a relatively short four-year follow-up period, says Dr. Ley. That said, the findings are still worth noting, she says. They add to the ongoing discussion about the role of diet in menopause. They also seem to back up data from the Nurses’ Health Study II, which suggested that dietary factors — specific...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - August 10, 2018 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Kelly Bilodeau Tags: Health Healthy Eating Menopause Vaccines Source Type: blogs
National Breastfeeding Month
August is National Breastfeeding Month. According to the Office on Women’s Health, breastfed babies have lower risks during their childhood of obesity, ear infections, asthma and other conditions. Breast milk is rich in nutrients and easier for babies to digest than formula. Breastfeeding can help a mother’s health and healing following childbirth and leads to a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, certain types of breast cancer and ovarian cancer. Unfortunately, African American mothers have the lowest rates of starting and continuing to breastfeed their infant. See the Guide to Breastfeeding from the Office of Women&#...
Source: BHIC - August 8, 2018 Category: Databases & Libraries Authors: Patricia Devine Tags: Children and Teens Minority Health Concerns Source Type: blogs
Treating women with a low AMH level
Treating women with poor ovarian reserve (as defined by a low AMH level and a low antral follicle count ) can be extremely difficult. A lot of these patients don't know what they should do because they get so much conflicting advice.Should they be trying IVF with their own eggs ? with aggressive superovulation ? or with minimal stimulation ? Or should they continue trying in their own bedroom ? or should they use donor eggs? Does it make sense to spend so much money on an IVF cycle if the success rate is going to be so poor? However, it ’s hard to accept that you will need to use donor eggs, because i...
Source: Dr.Malpani's Blog - August 8, 2018 Category: Reproduction Medicine Tags: low amh low AMH levels poor egg quality Poor ovarian reserve Source Type: blogs
Method Tracks How Cancer Drugs Spread to Tumor Cells
When it comes to anti-cancer drugs, it’s not only their effectiveness at killing the intended target that we want to know, but also their ability to reach and penetrate the cancer cells. Knowing whether the drug actually enters cancer cells can be as important as whether it’s effective once inside.
Now researchers at Francis Crick Institute and Imperial College London, both in the UK, have developed a technique that lets them measure a drug’s penetration into cells in situ. This is important, as laboratory studies on small groups of cells may be misleading as to what actually ends up happening when a dru...
Source: Medgadget - July 17, 2018 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Editors Tags: Genetics Materials Oncology Source Type: blogs
Why do IVF success rates vary so much from clinic to clinic?
One reason why IVF success rates vary is because some clinics are much better than others, because of their superior expertise and depth of experience. Remember, the success rates don ’t depend upon just the doctor’s clinical skills – they are also affected by how good the embryologist is, and the coordination between the laboratory and the clinical team. Sadly, many IVF clinics depend upon “travelling embryologists”, and they don’t have a full-time embryologist. What ’s even worse is that patients are clueless about the fact that such a key professional is missing !The other reason is because their success r...
Source: Dr.Malpani's Blog - July 16, 2018 Category: Reproduction Medicine Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, July 16th 2018
We presently forget 98% of everything we experience. That will go away in favor of perfect, controllable, configurable memory. Skills and knowledge will become commodities that can be purchased and installed. We will be able to feel exactly as we wish to feel at any given time. How we perceive the world will be mutable and subject to choice. How we think, the very fundamental basis of the mind, will also be mutable and subject to choice. We will merge with our machines, as Kurzweil puts it. The boundary between mind and computing device, between the individual and his or her tools, will blur.
Over the course of the ...
Source: Fight Aging! - July 15, 2018 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
What are my chances of getting pregnant with IVF ?
The commonest question which a patient asks their IVF doctor is, "What are my chances of getting pregnant?" Now this is a deceptively simple question , but the answer can be surprisingly complicated, which is why most doctors will take one of two approaches to answer this.Most will provide a highly inflated figure , because their only purpose is to make sure that the patient comes to them for treatment. So they'll say state some outrageous figure like 70% per cycle — an arbitrary number they pull out of their hat—and they have no way of being able to prove that this is the right number. Unfortunately , patients are not...
Source: Dr.Malpani's Blog - July 15, 2018 Category: Reproduction Medicine Source Type: blogs
Chimeric Antigen Receptor Therapy, but Using Natural Killer Cells
Adding chimeric antigen receptors to T cells (CAR-T), causing them to aggressively target cancer cells, has proven to be a fruitful approach to the treatment of cancer. Like most immunotherapies, it can result in potentially severe side-effects related to excessive immune activation, but it is also quite effective. Treatment of forms of leukemia in particular has produced good results in a large fraction of patients who have trialed the therapy. In the research reported here, scientists extend the chimeric antigen receptor approach to natural killer cells rather than T cells, noting that this may prove to be both safer and...
Source: Fight Aging! - July 9, 2018 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Get The Best Clinic For In Vitro Fertilization
When God made the world, he gave ability, to each live substance to produce their generation. Processes may differ, but whether a human or an ameba, they naturally made their next generations. Living feels good when you see your child and it is also true that having no child is the worst thing in this world. People live just for their family and everyone’s wish is to play with their grandchildren at their senescence. After all, there is no other happiness exist than seeing smiles on your child’s face and listen their laughing. Lots of people can produce their own child, but there are some peoples who are not ab...
Source: Nurse Blogger - July 2, 2018 Category: Nursing Authors: Fabiola Panicucci Tags: Medical Services Source Type: blogs
The Not-Quite Annual ASCO Round-Up - 2018 edition
by Drew RosielleTheAmerican Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting, besides being a feast for the pharmaceutical business news pages (google ' ASCO ' and most of the hits will be about how announcement X affected drug company Y ' s stock), is also one of the premiere platforms for publishing original palliative-oncology research. So every year I try to at least scan the abstracts to see what ' s happening, and I figure I might as well blog about it. It ' s tough to analyze abstracts, so I ' ll mostly just be summarizing ones that I think will be of interest to hospice and palliative care folks. I imagine I ' ve missed...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - June 6, 2018 Category: Palliative Care Tags: artificial nutrition ASCO cannabanoid code status conference reviews fatigue hpmglobal marijuana mindfulness mucositis neuropathic oncology pain race rosielle scrambler Source Type: blogs
Clear your mind from all the distracting requirements clinicians face
After a Harvard endocrinology course several years ago, I walked out into the weak afternoon spring sunshine and crossed the street to the Boston Public Garden. Among the multitude of faces of the other flaneurs I was certain I saw scores of people suffering from endocrine diseases — probably undiagnosed, I thought to myself: I saw tall men with big jaws, typical of acromegaly; stout women with skinny extremities and flushed, puffy cheeks so typical of Cushing’s syndrome; hirsute, heavy set younger women sure to have polycystic ovary syndrome; long-legged beardless men, who seemed classic for Klinefelter’s; and o...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - May 29, 2018 Category: General Medicine Authors: < a href="https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/post-author/a-country-doctor" rel="tag" > A Country Doctor, MD < /a > Tags: Physician Mobile health Primary Care Source Type: blogs
Helen Lawson and black salve: Cutting, burning, and poisoning “ naturally ”
Cancer quacks frequently characterize conventional treatments for cancer as "cutting, poisoning, and burning." Yet, in Australia a woman with ovarian cancer chose black salve, in essence, "cutting, poisoning, and burning" (but mostly burning and without the cutting) to treat her disease. She died a horrible death. How can black salve still be a thing.
The post Helen Lawson and black salve: Cutting, burning, and poisoning “naturally” appeared first on RESPECTFUL INSOLENCE. (Source: Respectful Insolence)
Source: Respectful Insolence - May 24, 2018 Category: Surgery Authors: Orac Tags: Cancer Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking alternative cancer cure testimonial Belinda Davies black salve bloodroot Cansema Dennis Wayne Jensen escharotic featured Karen Lawson ovarian cancer Stanisla Source Type: blogs
