Month: August 2012

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Dads Should Get Fit Before Reproducing to Assist with Fetal Development

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A father’s obesity negatively impacts sperm, which results in smaller fetuses, poor pregnancy success and decreased placental development, according to a team of experts at the University of Melbourne’s Department of Zoology.

The study urges men to get ‘match fit’ before getting their women pregnant to help with fetal development. Scientists are now encouraging men to shape up, even though health risks of obesity and pregnancy are usually focused on overweight moms.

According to estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO), 75% of Australian adult males are overweight or obese, which significantly exceeds the global average rate of 48%.

The research, led by Professor David Gardner, Dr. Natalie Hannan and Ph.D. student Natalie Binder, will be presented at the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Endocrine Society of Australia and the Society for Reproductive Biology 2012, starting August 26 to 29 on the Gold Coast. Read full article.

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In-Law Infighting Boosted Evolution of Menopause

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Conflict between women and their daughters-in-law could be a factor in explaining an evolutionary puzzle — the human menopause.

Humans, pilot whales and killer whales are the only animals known to stop being able to reproduce long before they die. In terms of evolution, where passing on your genes is the main reason for living, the menopause remains puzzling.

Mothers-in-law can help to care for their grandchildren — unless they have their own children at the same time.

Now, using a large data set from Finland, researchers have for the first time been able to test a hypothesis that competition between different generations of genetically unrelated breeding women could have promoted the evolution of the menopause. The results are published today in Ecology Letters1.

Mirkka Lahdenperä, an ecologist at the University of Turku in Finland, and her colleagues used data from meticulous birth, death and marriage records kept by the Lutheran church in the country between 1702 and 1908. As they dug into the data, the researchers found that the chances of children dying increased when mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law gave birth around the same time. For children of the older women, survival dropped by 50%. For children of the daughters-in-law, it dropped by 66%. However, if mothers and daughters had children at the same time, the survival of those children wasn’t affected. Read full article.

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Links Between Disruptive Life Events, Poverty and Contraceptive Use

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The researchers, from the Guttmacher Institute in New York, base their findings on feedback data from almost 9,500 women who had an abortion in 2008 (Abortion Patient Survey), in the light of 11 “disruptive” events, and the links between these, poverty, and contraceptive use.

The disruptive events included job loss, separation, falling behind on rental/mortgage payments, death of a close friend, a serious health problem, a partner being sent to prison and becoming a victim of crime.

Poverty in the US is defined as an annual income before tax of $17,500 for a family of three: in 2008, 13% of US residents met this criterion.

The researchers also carried out in-depth interviews with 49 women seeking abortions to flesh out themes from the feedback data.

Their analysis showed that more than half (57%) of the women who had had an abortion had faced a major life stressor in the preceding year. One in 5 had lost their jobs; one in 6 had separated from their partner; one in 7 had fallen behind on their rental or mortgage payments, while one in 8 had moved several times.

One in 10 had experienced the death of a close friend or had had a baby over the past year. And 7% had been subjected to some form of domestic violence.

Women said that the fall-out from one disruptive event could set up a chain reaction. For example, one woman’s grief following the death of her mother kept her from leaving an abusive partner. Read full article.

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Semen’s Secret Ingredient Induces Ovulation

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If you’re trying to avoid getting pregnant, here’s another reason to mistrust the rhythm method of birth control: New research confirms that the fluid in semen, long dismissed as primarily a vehicle for sperm, contains a substance that can trigger ovulation and other pregnancy-supporting hormonal responses in female mammals. The find could lead to new fertility treatments in humans.

Like most female animals, women are spontaneous ovulators, meaning they release eggs on a fairly regular basis regardless of their sexual activity. A few animal species, however, such as camels and rabbits, release viable eggs only in response to sex. These animals are called “induced ovulators.” For decades, scientific dogma has held that in induced ovulators, the physical stimulation of sex triggers hormonal responses within the female that lead to the production and release of eggs. In 1985, however, a group of Chinese researchers challenged this idea by suggesting that there might be an ovulation-inducing factor (OIF) in semen itself. According to veterinarian and reproductive biologist Gregg Adams of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, the hypothesis ran so counter to common wisdom that “people just ignored it. Me included.”

When Adams and his colleagues finally tested the idea decades later, they were taken aback by their results. In 2005, the team injected the seminal fluid of male llamas — closely related to camels — into the hind legs of female llamas to see if the llamas would ovulate without genital stimulation. To their surprise, he says, injecting seminal fluid into the female llamas’ bloodstream had “a very potent ovulatory effect.” Read full article.

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Katie Couric discusses fitness and menopause: Turning 55 was a wake-up call

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Television journalist Katie Couric doesn’t mind getting older, but admits that turning 55 was a major wake-up call alerting her that time is indeed running short.

“Being in the last half of your life is very scary,” Couric tells the September 2012 issue of Good Housekeeping. “Turning 55 was more of a wake-up call for me than 50 was. I’m very aware of getting every drop of joy from the present.”

Katie, who’s going through menopause, made a renewed commitment to working out to ward off menopausal weight gain.

“I kept hearing, ‘Your weight is going to re-distribute, you’re going to get thick in the middle.’ So I decided I needed to be more committed to exercising,” says Couric. “I’ve always done exercise, but I’ve never really committed to it. I’m not very good about pushing myself physically.” Read full article.

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Romney’s Running Mate Generates Media Storm Over Positions on Personhood and IVF

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Views held by Paul Ryan – the man chosen by US presidential hopeful Mitt Romney to be his running mate – that life begins at fertilisation have caused a media furore in North America.

Ryan is a co-sponsor of the Sanctity of Human Life Act, which has been reintroduced to the House of Representatives and that states ‘human life shall be deemed to begin with fertilisation’.

Under the proposed law, embryos discarded during IVF would become ‘murder victims’, commented US political magazine Mother Jones. The magazine said, if it became law, the Act ‘would make Romney’s kids criminals’ since three of them have relied on IVF treatment in order to become parents.

During IVF multiple embryos are often created that may not all be implanted during one cycle of treatment. These ‘spare’ embryos can either be frozen and stored for future use, used by other prospective parents, used in research, or destroyed.

If passed, the Sanctity of Human Life Act would ‘criminalise IVF’, said The Daily Beast, a US news and opinion website – something which Amy Goodman in the Guardian reflected on: ‘As reported in Mother Jones, this law would make normal IVF practices illegal’, she said.

However, other journalists are calling much of the attention ‘bad reporting’, claiming that the media has distorted Ryan’s Act. There is no evidence that Ryan believes in criminalising IVF and that ‘efforts to imply otherwise in order to create a neat little conflict… are misleading and irresponsible’, Marni Soupcoff said in the Canadian National Post. Read full article.

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Testing What We Think We Know

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BY 1990, many doctors were recommending hormone replacement therapy to healthy middle-aged women and P.S.A. screening for prostate cancer to older men. Both interventions had become standard medical practice.

But in 2002, a randomized trial showed that preventive hormone replacement caused more problems (more heart disease and breast cancer) than it solved (fewer hip fractures and colon cancer). Then, in 2009, trials showed that P.S.A. screening led to many unnecessary surgeries and had a dubious effect on prostate cancer deaths.

How would you have felt — after over a decade of following your doctor’s advice — to learn that high-quality randomized trials of these standard practices had only just been completed? And that they showed that both did more harm than good? Justifiably furious, I’d say. Because these practices affected millions of Americans, they are locked in a tight competition for the greatest medical error on record.

The problem goes far beyond these two. The truth is that for a large part of medical practice, we don’t know what works. But we pay for it anyway. Our annual per capita health care expenditure is now over $8,000. Many countries pay half that — and enjoy similar, often better, outcomes. Isn’t it time to learn which practices, in fact, improve our health, and which ones don’t?

To find out, we need more medical research. But not just any kind of medical research. Medical research is dominated by research on the new: new tests, new treatments, new disorders and new fads. But above all, it’s about new markets. Read full article.

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BPA (and More) Lowering Sperm Counts Across the Board

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If there was a problem with fertility, most men wouldn’t know it until they tried to conceive a child. Everything can seem to be in great working condition, but low sperm counts leading to infertility are more common than we might think. As a matter of fact, contrary to popular belief, about half of all infertility cases involve some problem on the man’s side of the two-person equation.

Sperm Counts Plummeting from Chemicals

According to experts, this usually comes as a surprise to men, who assume everything is working well until their wife doesn’t conceive after a few months of trying. Unlike in women, where symptoms like missed periods of erratic bleeding can signal fertility issues ahead of time, for men the problem is undetectable until the sperm is expected to perform.

 Numerous factors can contribute to male infertility, but one—low sperm count—has progressively been getting worse over the past 50 years.

What’s causing the lowered sperm counts in men? Several things can be blamed, says Dr. Paul Turek, a male fertility specialist.

Contributing factors to a low sperm count include:

  • Keeping your cell phone in your pocket
  • Consistently using a laptop in your lap
  • Smoking
  • Drinking
  • Recreational drugs
  • Some hair loss medications
  • Illness
  • Stress
  • BPA
 

Yes, BPA (Bispehnol-A), still found in plastic food containers, can seriously affect both male and female fertility. Though the FDA recently moved to ban the use of BPA in baby bottles, it is still found in numerous everyday products. And even those labeled “BPA-free” now contain a distant relative to BPA, known as BPS chemical, whose affects may be just as detrimental. Read full article.