August 30th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Longtime readers may recall that late last year, the New York Times published an essay about how hard Big Pharma has worked to market menopause as an estrogen deficiency disease. Despite that exposé and others of the well-documented risks and limited benefits of hormone therapy, plus thousands of lawsuits pending over the role of HT in breast cancer, there’s apparently still quite a large potential market for pharmaceutical treatments for menopause (and other women’s health concerns).
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.
Tags: advertising, big pharma, marketing, Menopause, women's health
Posted in Advertising, Menopause, New Research, Pharmaceutical | 2 Comments »
August 18th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
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.)
Tags: birth control pill, brain, gender difference, neuroplasticity, sex difference
Posted in New Research, Newspapers, anatomy | 2 Comments »
August 12th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
'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...
Tags: breast cancer, breasts, Girls, Menarche, puberty
Posted in Girls, Internet, Media, New Research, Newspapers, anatomy | 2 Comments »
August 11th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Fascinating new research from the National Institutes of Health finds that women’s cholesterol levels correspond with cyclic changes in estrogen levels. Total cholesterol levels can vary by as much as 19% over the course of the cycle.
The researchers found that as the level of estrogen rises, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol also rises, peaking at the time of ovulation.
In a typical cycle, estrogen levels steadily increase as the egg cell matures, peaking just before ovulation. Previous studies have shown that taking formulations which contain estrogen — oral contraceptives or menopausal hormone therapy — can affect cholesterol levels. However, the results of studies examining the effects of naturally occurring hormone levels on cholesterol have not been conclusive. According to the NIH’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, high blood cholesterol levels raise the risk for heart disease.
. . . .
In contrast, total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels — as well as another form of blood fat known as triglycerides — declined as estrogen levels rose. The decline was not immediate, beginning a couple of days after the estrogen peak at ovulation.
These findings provide another reason for girls and women to learn to track their cycles, so their blood tests can be interpreted more precisely.
It also gives more weight to the frequent assertion of members of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research that menstruation matters — and is worthy of our study — in part because it is not an event isolated in the uterus and vagina, but a complex part of the endocrine system that has effects on health and well-being throughout a woman’s body.
Tags: cholesterol, endocrine system, estrogen, hormones, menstrual cycle, ovulation
Posted in Health Care, Menstruation, New Research, ovulation | 1 Comment »
July 29th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Tags: Birth Control, boys/men, condoms, domestic violence, public health, reproductive coercion, teens, unintended pregnancy
Posted in Birth Control, Girls, Health Care, Men, New Research | 2 Comments »
July 19th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
It’s been two weeks since Chris Hitchcock and I returned from San Diego’s recent Endocrine Society meetings. We are feeling incredibly happy with the success of our protracted, intense commitments to a controlled trial of oral micronized progesterone (marketed in the USA and Canada as Prometrium®) for night sweats and hot flushes/flashes. At the Endocrine Society we presented the first-ever trial showing that the molecularly identical progesterone by mouth is effective treatment for vasomotor symptoms (VMS = hot flushes/flashes and night sweats)(1). We were also invited to present our data at an Endocrine Society-sponsored press conference.
Why did a scientific study require so much from us? First, this trial started in 2003 as the initial scientific venture of the newly founded Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research–thus CeMCOR’s reputation became tied to this trial. Second, despite concerted efforts, we were never able to obtain peer reviewed funding for this study—we successfully supported it with individual private donations. Finally, because of the “estrogen myth” and its corollary negatives about progesterone, I wanted to gain additional accurate information about how Prometrium® works in women’s cardiovascular system from this same study. For that reason we decided to enroll only very healthy women who were within 1-10 years since their final flow—they had to be non-smokers, without obesity, diabetes, or high blood pressure, and further to have normal measured waist circumference, blood pressure, cholesterol, and fasting blood sugar levels. Therefore many women were interested but few were eligible. Continue reading...
Tags: CeMCOR, clinical trial, estrogen, guest post, hormones, hot flashes/flushes, Menopause, progesterone
Posted in Menopause, New Research, Pharmaceutical | 1 Comment »
July 14th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Photo of art by Czarnobyl by Flickr user urbanartcore.eu || CC 2.0
Since yesterday, although it seems longer, my RSS reader has been clogged with links to news reports about a UCSF study in which some women who lost weight found that their hot flashes diminished. Of course, that’s not what the headlines say. Here’s a sample of some of the titles of current stories about this study on Google news:
- Hot Flash Relief: Weight Loss Works, What Doesn’t? (US News & World Report)
- Bad hot flashes? Try dropping a few pounds (MSNBC.com)
- Losing weight may ease menopause symptoms (NBC13.com)
- Symptoms of Menopause Can Be Relieved by Weight Loss (Health News)
- Weight Loss Helped Overweight And Obese Women Reduce Hot Flushes (Medical News Today)
OK, that’s enough – see the trend? Suddenly weight loss is the cure for hot flashes. But in the actual study – which was about urinary incontinence, not menopause -141 women provided researchers with data about their hot flash symptoms six months after the study began. Sixty-five of the 141 women said they were less bothered by their hot flashes six months after participating in the weight loss program, 53 reported no change, and 23 women reported a worsening of symptoms.
Look at those numbers again, more slowly this time: 65 of 141 women who participated in a weight loss program were less bothered by hot flashes after six months. That’s 46% of the women – less than half – who found relief. Almost as many reported no change in symptoms, so why is this being touted as a successful intervention?
Because the women lost weight. Most of the news reports of this research stop just short of fat-shaming, but I submit that is exactly why this study is getting so much media attention. Even though it is well-established that diets do not work, even if you call them a “lifestyle change” or “a whole new way of eating”, and that the BMI (Body Mass Index) is useless as a gauge of health. In fact, fat is not a measure of health. But why pass up an opportunity to shame women about their bodies?
Tags: body image, fat acceptance, hot flashes/flushes, Menopause, shame
Posted in Media, Menopause, New Research, Newspapers | 4 Comments »
July 8th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Tags: Birth Control, heavy bleeding, IUD, Mirena, painful periods, teens
Posted in Birth Control, Dysmenorrhea, Girls, Health Care, Menorrhagia, New Research, Pharmaceutical | 1 Comment »
July 7th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Photo by Ed Yourdon | CC 2.0
I hope my colleague Heather Dillaway feels at least at little vindicated when she reads this: A new study in the Journal of Health Psychology reports that social and psychological factors have the biggest influence upon women´s sexual behavior during menopause, rather than biological changes such as declining hormone levels. While most published research on menopause–especially about sex and sexuality with respect to menopause–is conducted within a biomedical framework, Sharron Hinchliff, Merryn Gott, and Christine Ingleton talked to women about their experiences. (Radical!)
They found that almost all of the women in their study had experienced changes in their sex lives, but they attributed these changes to external factors, such as caring for ill or elderly relatives, low sexual desire from their partners, issues of relationship quality, as well as to perceived changes in levels of hormones. (I appreciate the researchers’ qualifier of perceived changes, as most women never have their hormone levels measured.)
The researchers concluded that women go through many lifestyle changes at mid-life, only some of which are biological. Psychological and social factors, as well as the increasing medicalization of menopause, affect their sexuality just as powerfully.
Somehow, this study isn’t getting anywhere near the publicity of the ‘new blood test for menopause’ study received last week.
Tags: menopausal transition, Menopause, middle-aged women, midlife, publicity
Posted in Menopause, New Research, Sex | 2 Comments »
July 2nd, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Photo by Flickr user be_khe | CC 3.0
The Internet, especially the feminist blogosphere, is all abuzz this week with the promise of a new contraceptive pill for men within the next five years. But researchers always say a pill for men is just five years away, according to University of Washington medical professor John K. Amory.
The spark of new hope stems from an interview with Professor Haim Breitbart of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, published June 28 in London’s Telegraph. Breitbart promises a monthly pill, free of side effects, for men. The Telegraph says human trials are scheduled to begin next year.
How does this proposed pill work? The answer lies in a breakthrough paper Breitbart published four years ago, in which he and his colleagues announced a new discovery about how sperm cells create new proteins after ejaculation, while hanging around in the uterus before fertilization can take place. Breitbart believes that if this protein production process can be derailed, conception can be prevented without hormones. He calls his chemical concoction the Bright Pill (a twist on his name). Continue reading...
Tags: Birth Control, birth control pill, Men, oral contraceptive pills
Posted in Birth Control, Internet, Media, New Research | 4 Comments »
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.
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