The headline of a story at ABC news about infertility among female athletes is “Female Athletes Are Too Fit To Get Pregnant“. Many women athletes in their 20s, at peak performance levels and peak physical fitness by most measures, may find themselves unable to conceive. This is attributed to low percentages of body fat, which essentially shut down the hypothalamus, which then fails to trigger the H-P-O (hypothalamus, pituitary, ovary) hormone sequence necessary for regular menstrual cycles. About 12% of infertile women seeking treatment are athletes.
According to the article, even women who are not professional athletes (or training at that level) can experience infertility due to physical fitness:
It noted that recreational jogging — only 12 to 18 miles a week — can result in poor follicular development, decreased estrogen and progesterone secretion and absent ovulation.
Setting aside the seriousness of infertility, I’m intrigued by the tone of the article, and especially the language of the headline. In North America today, there is a strong emphasis socially and in mass media on the importance of exercise and being physically fit, and corresponding demonization of fatness as a personal moral failing. But amenorrhea and infertility as a result of thinness is reported without judgment and body-shaming. There are no quotations from experts about women exercising too much or advice to stop working out; instead, professional athletes are advised to freeze their eggs in their early 20s. When fat* women have trouble conceiving or have difficult pregnancies, it is frequently attributed to their weight, which is presumed to be a behavioral a matter of choice.
*I am following the practice of other advocates of fat acceptance and Health At Every Size (HAES) in using the term fat as a descriptive adjective, not a pejorative.
At last, my girlish fantasies realized! I have always dreamed of a man who would have dinner almost ready when I got home, and then mansplain the intricacies of feminine hygiene products while the risotto simmered.
Except I grew up in the 1970s, so my fantasy man shaved his face, not his chest, before our date.
To find out exactly how to mine that market, you can purchase the research report titled Women’s Health Therapeutics Market to 2016 – High Unmet Need will Drive the Uptake of Novel Drugs in Menopause and Osteoporosis from GBI Research. The report promises the following:
Analysis of the women’s health market in the leading geographies of the world, which include the US, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan.
Market characterization of the women’s health market, including market size, annual cost of therapy, sales volume and treatment usage patterns.
Key drivers and barriers that have a significant impact on the market.
This will better allow you to “align your product portfolio to the markets with high growth potential” and “develop market-entry and market expansion strategies by identifying the leading therapeutic segments and geographic markets poised for strong growth”. Not to mention the ability to “reinforce R&D pipelines by identifying new target mechanisms which can produce first-in-class molecules with more efficiency and better safety”.
It all looks very useful. Too bad I don’t have an extra $3500 in my back pocket.
Vulva Activism: The New View Campaign takes it on the road, holding a counter-meeting during the Second Global Symposium on Cosmetic Vaginal Surgery in Las Vegas.
It’s not about the menstrual cycle or reproductive health, but it’s definitely a women’s health issue: I wrote about the million-dollar diet at Stephens College for Ms. blog
Yep, you’re a lady, so step 1 in asking your boss for a raise is washing your ladyparts with special ladysoap. It’s not until step 8 that we get around to “focus on things you’ve done for the company’s bottom line”.
Hi I am Angela Bryant, Summer’s Eve Brand Manager. I would like to first of all apologize if this ad in anyway has offended anyone. We are taking immediate next steps to remove the ad from circulation. We want you to know that Fleet Laboratories and the Summer’s Eve brand have the utmost respect for women. While we understand how some may come to an alternative conclusion regarding our recent ad, that was never our intention. Thank you.
If you’ve already made the switch, this is an easy way to persuade your friends. You can email it, Tweet, share it on Facebook, heck, cue it up on your smartphone and show it to ‘em!
Ladies, are your tampons doing enough? Apparently absorbing menstrual fluid without leaking is no longer sufficient: new, Brilliant pH tampons “are clinically shown to reduce the usual feminine pH increase that occurs during your period.”
But let Dr. Streicher explain in this commercial for Brilliant pH tampons.
Video should open in new window.
Of course, Brilliant also includes a “comfortable, soft plastic applicator” with “smooth rounded tip” and raised ridge for “easy grip”.
Positron emission tomography image of a human brain
Does taking the Pill increase the size of your brain? According to this story in The Daily Mail, you betcha. And it makes women more talkative, too. That’s right – brain scans of 28 women PROVE it.
I know not to take too seriously such headlines in The Daily Mail (there’s a reason my British friends like to call it The Daily Fail), but if that story has you gnashing your teeth, consider this piece from The Guardian to be the antidote:
In fact, there are no major neurological differences between the sexes, says Cordelia Fine in her book Delusions of Gender, which will be published by Icon next month. There may be slight variations in the brains of women and men, added Fine, a researcher at Melbourne University, but the wiring is soft, not hard. “It is flexible, malleable and changeable,” she said.
In short, our intellects are not prisoners of our genders or our genes and those who claim otherwise are merely coating old-fashioned stereotypes with a veneer of scientific credibility. It is a case backed by Lise Eliot, an associate professor based at the Chicago Medical School. “All the mounting evidence indicates these ideas about hard-wired differences between male and female brains are wrong,” she told the Observer.
“Yes, there are basic behavioural differences between the sexes, but we should note that these differences increase with age because our children’s intellectual biases are being exaggerated and intensified by our gendered culture. Children don’t inherit intellectual differences. They learn them. They are a result of what we expect a boy or a girl to be.”
Now adding Delusions of Gender to my reading list; I’ve already read Lise Eliot’s Pink Brain, Blue Brain. (I also heard her present this work at a conference; it’s a very compelling presentation.)
There is almost certainly a connection between emotions and health, but blaming the Angry Vagina seems another way telling the ladies it’s all in their heads, albeit a different body part.
'Puberty' by Edvard Munch. Photo courtesy of Flickr user independentman // CC 2.0
When the story that girls are reaching puberty earlier than ever began popping up everywhere this week, I did not doubt its veracity. It was no coincidence that I received an email from a friend yesterday, observing with mixed feelings that she had just purchased a first bra for her oldest daughter. Her daughter is 9.
News about girls reaching puberty earlier and earlier isn’t exactly new. We saw a flurry of stories in late 2009, when studies found an association between early menarche, late menopause and breast cancer. Additionally, the finding that African American girls often show signs of pubertal development earlier than other girls is well-established.
The study that triggered this new explosion of publicity, published this week in Pediatrics, assessed girls’ development by evaluating the size of breast buds (as breasts are called in early stages of development). The researchers evaluated an ethnically diverse population of 1,239 girls ages 6 to 8 across three research sites. They found that 10.4 percent of white, 23.4 percent of black and 14.9 percent of Hispanic 7-year-olds had reached “Sexual Maturation Stage 2.” Stage 2 is more typically reached at age 10, but may occur any time from age 8 to age 13. Menarche, the first menstrual period, occurs on average at age 12, in Stage 4, but it, too, varies, occurring as early as age 9 and as late as age 17. Continue reading...
Readers should note that statements published in re: Cycling are those of individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Society as a whole.
The headline of a story at ABC news about infertility among female athletes is “Female Athletes Are Too Fit To Get Pregnant“. Many women athletes in their 20s, at peak performance levels and peak physical fitness by most measures, may find themselves unable to conceive. This is attributed to low percentages of body fat, which essentially shut down the hypothalamus, which then fails to trigger the H-P-O (hypothalamus, pituitary, ovary) hormone sequence necessary for regular menstrual cycles. About 12% of infertile women seeking treatment are athletes.
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