Entries for March 2008

"The women who gathered for dinner late last month were all single New Yorkers in their 20s and 30s," wrote Michael Gross in the New York Times. Describing a "girl's night out" where the conversation was all about condoms, he quoted a 26-year-old interior designer who called it a "panic situation" where everyone seems to be buying condoms because "casual sex is not worth dying for."

A sign that today's women are taking the proper precautions? Not exactly. That article was published in 1987. My, how times have changed. A report out this month from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit reproductive health research organization, finds that:

I often worry when I write about pregnancy-related health news that I'm going to scare mothers-to-be. One pregnant colleague joked that she was afraid to bite into a doughnut after reading an article I wrote on how nourishment during pregnancy may impact a baby's health into adulthood. So, it's with a bit of hesitation that I report on a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It found that premature babies (defined as those born before 37 weeks of gestation, or more than three weeks before their due date) were at greater risk of dying throughout childhood. The highest risk was observed in those born at or before 27 weeks of gestation; those born more than eight weeks early also had a higher risk of becoming infertile adults, compared with babies born at full term.

These findings are pretty scary stuff, especially given that preterm birth is often difficult if not impossible to prevent. Medications given to halt premature labor, like magnesium sulfate or nitroglycerin patches, often fail to halt labor for more than a day or two. Plus, the problem is getting worse because of the increasing average age of expectant mothers and growing use of fertility treatments, leading to multiple births and medical complications that often end pregnancy early. Preterm births now account for nearly 13 percent of all U.S. births, compared to 9 percent 25 years ago.

Last September, I wrote about my friend Panina, 37, whose breast cancer was found on a baseline screening mammogram. After coming through chemotherapy and radiation in a state of grace, she's now taking the anti-estrogen drug tamoxifen, which she'll stay on for five years to lower her chances of recurrence. Lately, given the recent finding that other anti-estrogen drugs often prescribed after tamoxifen—called aromatase inhibitors—can help ward off cancer better than tamoxifen alone, she's wondered if she'll be able to take them and reap the benefit.

Other breast cancer patients are probably asking the same thing: The headline-making study, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, found that postmenopausal patients who took the aromatase inhibitor Femara after stopping tamoxifen three years earlier on average had an 80 percent reduced risk of developing a new breast tumor and more than a 60 percent lower risk of life-threatening distant metastases compared with former tamoxifen takers who were given placebos. All in all, those taking Femara after tamoxifen were on anti-estrogen drugs for a total of 10 years. "I think this finding can make a very large difference in the outcome," says study leader Paul Goss, director of breast cancer research at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston (who is a paid consultant for Novartis, manufacturer of Femara).

When news broke this week about New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's liaisons with high-priced prostitutes, the question on many women's minds was: How could she? How could the Harvard Law-educated Silda Wall Spitzer stand beside him at the podium twice as he apologized on Monday and then announced his resignation yesterday?

Bloggers' expressions of outrage over Wall Spitzer's "standing by her man" were rampant:

"The picture in the New York Times is so telling, so sad, so perfectly humiliating," laments the Huffington Post's Amy Ephron.

With three kids and a full-time job, I find that having time on my hands is a rare luxury on a par with a Godiva truffle. Thus, I jumped at the chance to spend a full decadent hour by myself in a flotation tank.

When it comes to keeping good health habits, many of us make a concerted effort to eat salads and whole grain cereal, go on power walks with friends, maybe even try a yoga class. But how many of us make sleep a top health priority?

My friends—mostly working moms like myself—complain about how little sleep they get, almost turning it into a competition. There's the teacher who's answering E-mails from parents at 1 a.m., and the lawyer who cooks five-course meals for company into the wee hours on Thursday nights. And, yes, last night I can brag that I was up until midnight addressing invitations to my son's birthday party.

A dear friend of mine, Sarah Stern, recently had an abnormal Pap test result showing precancerous cells. She submitted to all the requisite follow-up: a colposcopy, or microscopic examination of the cervix; a biopsy of the suspicious-looking area; and treatment with cryosurgery to freeze and destroy the abnormal cells. Plus, she endured plenty of fear and anxiety. Very few women in this country now die of the cancer that killed Eva Perón in the 1950s, but 1 in 3 will, like Sarah, have an abnormal Pap at some point in her life. It appears that you can reduce the odds of being the one, however, by getting vaccinated against the cervical cancer-causing virus known as HPV. The Gardasil vaccine cuts the rate of Pap abnormalities by 43 percent, researchers announced today at the meeting of the Society of Gynecologic Oncologists.

Let's qualify this a bit: The women in the vaccine study were ages 16 to 26, not infected with HPV, and followed for just three to four years—not the two or three decades it can take for precancerous lesions to develop. Still, this certainly adds to the reasons for getting vaccinated. Gardasil, the only vaccine currently available in the United States, protects against four HPV types, two of which cause genital warts and two of which are responsible for 70 percent of cervical cancers. A new vaccine called Cervarix could be approved by the Food and Drug Administration later this year.