We all know that excess exercise can stop a women’s periods.  Maybe this is nature telling us we are not supposed to have bodies like boys.

The study involved 68 women who had reached menopause and were taking hormone replacement for at least one year.

They found that compounds containing conjugated equine estrogen have negative effects on cognition whereas bio-identical estrogen (17β-estradiol/17β-E) has a positive or at least no effect.

The bottom line? Keep away from anything that comes out of a horse’s bottom.

According to Dr. Jonathon Tilly’s keynote address to North American Menopause Society (NAMS) 22nd Annual Meeting entitled”Ovarian Aging: Can Science Turn Back the Clock?”, the concept of the biological clock in which a woman’s egg supply becomes depleted over time might be reversible.

Based on experiments with mice, he suggests that a woman’s ovarian pool could possibly be replenished by implanting human oogonial stem cells that generate new germ cells and new oocytes in adult ovary tissue.

Researchers have used co-enzyme Q10 to make “older” mice produce not only more eggs but also healthier eggs.

They believe that if CoQ10 can have the same effect on humans then women seeking fertility treatment will not only produce embyros with less chance of chromosomal abnormalities but also there will be less need to transfer multiple embryos thus reducing the instance of multiple births due to IVF.

Read more: http://www.canada.com/Fertility+benefit+from+vitamin/5441089/story.html#ixzz1ZAnnwJBM

Read more: http://www.canada.com/Fertility+benefit+from+vitamin/5441089/story.html#ixzz1ZAmLC1AS

What is already known on this topic

• Although heart disease mortality increases with age, it is lower in women than in men

• It has been suggested that this protective effect is due to female sex hormones, and the protection is therefore lost at menopause

What this study adds

• Heart disease mortality in women increased exponentially with age, with no acceleration at menopause. In men, there was a rapid increase during young adulthood followed by reduced rates of increase

• The early rapid acceleration in male heart disease mortality could explain these sex differences rather than menopausal changes in women

• Efforts to improve cardiac health in women should focus on their lifetime risk rather than only after menopause

Symptoms of heart attack vary significantly between men to women.  For men it is the traditional pain the chest and left arm.  However for women it is not so. While the most common heart attack symptom is still some type of pain, pressure or discomfort in the chest, women are more likely than are men to also have heart attack symptoms without chest pain, such as:

• Neck, jaw, shoulder, upper back or abdominal discomfort
• Shortness of breath
• Nausea or vomiting
• Abdominal pain or “heartburn”
• Sweating
• Light headedness or dizziness
• Unusual or unexplained fatigue.

Unfortunately many doctors are still uneducated in this regard and therefore women need to factor this in when experiencing the above symptoms.

In a recent study on incontinence and obesity, researchers noticed that losing weight could help lessen the frequency and  intensity of hot flashes.  And of course the headlines followed with “lose weight” messages to all women.  No mention being made on how it might improve incontinence itself.

But they have no idea why weight has any effect on hot flashes  and this particular study provides no new clues. The women did not follow a set diet or exercise regime.  They were merely “educated” and left to record their efforts.  

Since significant numbers of thin women also suffer from hot flashes, it could well be that regular exercise rather than being actually ”losing a few pounds” that is the clue.

“Walking for 45 minutes a few times a week may help women in the “battle of the bulge” that often accompanies menopause, and at the same time improve overall well being”

The study compared two groups of women: perimenopausal and post menopausal over a 16 weeks predio walking 45 minues a day every second day. They found that

“Greater weight loss was achieved by the premenopausal women who lost an average of about 4.4 pounds compared to 1.5 pounds for the postmenopausal women. They also tended to lose more fat mass. Postmenopausal women, however, tended to benefit with a larger drop in their waist size and from gains in lean body mass”

It apparently also improved their sense of well-being.

They found that exercising an hour a day helped women who were already a healthy weight range (BMI 25 or less) to maintain their weight. Others needed to combine calorie restriction with exercise to lose weight.  

 WebMD has a good interpretation of the study findings:

Exercise and Weight Control: Study Details

Lee and her colleagues followed more than 34,000 women who had participated in the Women’s Health Study. The women’s average age at the study start in 1992 was 54.

Women self-reported physical activity and weight at the study start and at years, 3, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 13.

All women ate a normal diet, and there weren’t instructions to reduce calories.

The researchers classified the women into three activity groups, depending on the level of activity:

• One group was active less than about 150 minutes a week — the amount of moderate intensity activity recommended for health benefits (but not necessarily weight control), according to 2008 federal guidelines.
• A second group was active more than 150 minutes a week but less than 420.
• The most active group got in 420 or more minutes a week of moderate activity, or about an hour a day.

The researchers looked at physical activity and weight gain over intervals averaging three years.

Exercise and Weight Control: Study Results

Overall, Lee says, all three groups gained weight over time — an average of 5.7 pounds.

But the more active the women, the less they gained. ”Compared to women in the most active group, women in the two lesser active groups gained more weight,” Lee tells WebMD. ”Compared to the most active women, the two less active groups were more likely to gain 5 pounds over the three-year period. The second most active group was 7% more likely to gain the 5 pounds, and the least active group 11% more likely.”

The two lesser active groups were about equal, however, in the amount of weight gained, she says.

Initially, Lee says, the relationship between physical activity and weight control looked like it applied to everyone. But it did not.

Lee and her team also looked at a subgroup of women — those who started out at a healthy weight — that is, with a body mass index or BMI of less than 25 — and maintained a healthy weight throughout — that is, gained less than 5 pounds at the three-year interval. Thirteen percent of the women, or 4,540, had a BMI lower than 25 at the study start and maintained a healthy weight throughout. ”We found the relationship between physical activity and less weight gain held only for the women with a BMI of less than 25.”

So what does this mean for you?  If you have a BMI of 25 or less, you can get away with one hour exercise a day with no cut in calories. If you cannot do one hour’s exercise a day then along with the over-weight you will need to cut calories as well as exercise to decrease then maintain your weight.  How much of each can be worked out by looking at your BMR.

There is increasing concern that mammograms are forcing treatment on women who would be quite safe without it.  Many small cancers are slow growing and won’t kill but they can’t tell that until they cut them out and douse the remains with chemotherapy just to “make sure” so that in the end the cure can be worse than the disease.

So it is not surprising that the Denmark study, which compared breast cancer outcomes between areas that had a screening program and those that did not, found that breast cancer screening was of no great benefit.  But who would have thought that they would find that it was worse?

Among women who’d been offered screening, the breast cancer death rate fell by 1 percent between 1997 and 2006. In the same 10 years, breast cancer deaths in areas where screening wasn’t routine fell by 2 percent.

Whatever the reason, the conclusion is that whole-scale screening program are not necessarily effective.