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What You Can Do to Find the Cause of Breast Cancer
Tweet Share on Facebook October 7, 2009 Comment (4)Certainly a lot of progress has been made in the fight against breast cancer: more effective treatments, less disfiguring surgery, and genetic testing and high-tech imaging to catch it earlier. Yet, little is known about what actually triggers the disease. In fact, 70 percent of breast cancers have no explainable cause. Now women can join the effort to help researchers identify what leads to breast cancer—with the ultimate goal of preventing it. All you need to do is fill out a free online form to join the "Army of Women." (It took me five minutes.) You'll then receive twice-monthly E-mails telling you about research studies looking for participants.
"We have 312,000 people enrolled, but we're hoping to get to a million," breast surgeon Susan Love tells me. She's heading the initiative, launched a year ago with a grant from the Avon Foundation. Researchers are looking for healthy women of various ages as well as breast cancer survivors (women and men). One study at Stanford School of Medicine is looking for volunteers to study the impact that too much stress and too little sleep has on a woman's risk of developing cancer. Another is looking at a woman's personal and family medical history, and one is offering yoga classes to breast cancer patients to see if the classes can help reduce post-treatment fatigue. Here's the full list.
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Instant Body Image Boost: Fuller Figured Models in 'Glamour' Magazine
Tweet Share on Facebook October 6, 2009 Comment (5)Last month, I recommended that any woman berating herself for not having a perfect body should check out this photo published in Glamour magazine. The plus-size model shows that you can still look gorgeous even with a little belly flab. The overwhelmingly positive reader reaction prompted Glamour to devote several pages in its November issue to plus-size models, including this photo, aptly titled, "Oh, wow, these bodies are beautiful."
In a mass publicity blitz to promote the issue, Editor in Chief Cindi Leive told Ellen DeGeneres last week, "We're committing to picturing a wider range of body types on our pages."
Botticelli would be proud.
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Getting the Swine Flu Vaccine: How Long a Wait?
Tweet Share on Facebook October 5, 2009 Comment (6)As government officials gear up to begin distributing the swine flu vaccine this week, they fear two things: Too many people will rush to get limited supplies initially, and not enough people will get vaccinated overall. Doctors, especially pediatricians, are struggling to figure out how to administer a large number of injections quickly while still treating kids for the flu and other illnesses, the New York Times reports. I'm sure obstetricians-gynecologists are in the same boat. Both pregnant women and children are on the government's high-priority list to be among the first vaccinated because they're more likely to suffer severe complications when infected with the H1N1 virus that causes swine flu.
Many of us would like to know when we can get ourselves or our kids immunized. Making matters more complicated, the nasal spray formulation, which contains a weakened form of a live virus, will be the first to arrive: About 600,000 doses are due to hit hospitals and doctor's offices tomorrow, reported the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a press conference last Thursday. The nasal spray isn't approved for use in pregnant women or children under the age of 2 (or those with chronic health conditions); only an injection with fragments of a dead virus is. Tony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told me in a previous interview that this is an extra safety precaution put in place since live-virus vaccines sometimes cause mild fevers, which may lead to some concern during pregnancy or in very young children.
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Cervarix Didn't Cause British Girl's Death
Tweet Share on Facebook October 1, 2009 Comment (16)On Tuesday, I wrote about a British girl, Natalie Morton, who died shortly after receiving the HPV vaccine, Cervarix. Initial concerns were that the immunization caused the 14-year-old's death and possibly led the Food and Drug Administration to delay making its decision—which had been expected on Tuesday—on whether to approve Cervarix in the United States. Turns out, the girl probably died as a result of a malignant tumor in her heart and lungs, according to the coroner's report issued this morning. In a press conference, British public health official Caron Grainger said, "There's no indication that the HPV vaccine, which she had received shortly before her death, was a contributing factor to the death, which could have arisen at any point." The immunization programs for the human papillomavirus, which had been suspended in the girl's school and other schools in the Coventry region where she lived, will resume next week.
