Oh Really?

Procter & Gamble may be a household name for washing powder, but they also have a pharmaceutical arm that has just joined with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to produce a finding that will leave you as amazed as I was – not!

One of the often reported effects of the menopause is a loss of libido. When my good friend Dr Shirley Bond and I were giving workshops on coping with menopause this often came up in the discussion. We found women fell into two camps: they were worried by it, or delighted with it – unfortunately low libido is also associated with depression so it’s hard to sort out if it is the menopause or another life challenging situation that is causing it.

This new report was found in the official journal of the International Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (I often find the longer the name the less valuable the information, or is that just me?) and states at length what I just mentioned in the last sentence of the previous paragraph. Obviously brevity doesn’t bring a handsome research grant – where am I going wrong? The researchers ‘discovered’ that women with a low libido suffered physical symptoms and memory problems as well as depression. Lack of a fulfilling sex life could depress anyone, and those ‘senior moments’ are not an exclusively female characteristic in my experience. Being depressed just by itself can, and does, manifest all the same symptoms that they are describing in their report.

The research was done by phone over 1000 women in the USA by asking them to undertake a quality of life study. The women were asked about their levels of sexual desire and feelings of physical and emotional well-being or distress. Sadly they didn’t phone me, and I would hazard a guess that if they phoned women during the world cup or while trying to get dinner ready then they would have got some interesting results that weren’t necessarily typical of that woman’s everyday experience. Amazingly the women who had a low libido were more likely to be depressed and to express dissatisfaction with their home lives and their sexual partners. Having a low libido and an unsatisfactory partner can depress anyone but I am not convinced it is solely applicable to menopausal women as I said before.

Still I am sure there is another research project already under way to investigate my theory, and if you want to give your libido a boost and avoid all those symptoms, then I suggest you go to it in any way that works for you – I expect consumption of George Clooney DVD’s and boxes of chocolate to soar.

PMS Relief

I know many women suffer greatly from a variety of physical, mental and emotional symptoms with PMS (Pre Menstrual Syndrome) and their partners usually also suffer the fallout with monthly regularity. There are some very simple, natural, tips that can help and before you next lock yourself in a dark room with a hot water bottle and some painkillers, it might be worth trying some of these ideas first:

** Get your mineral balance right in particular calcium and magnesium. Just 400 mg of calcium carbonate daily has been shown to help with mood swings, bloating, and headaches. Several large studies have shown that women with PMS have lower calcium levels than women with a good intake from food sources who had very few symptoms.

** Calcium is best taken with magnesium for the best effect and a supplement of 200mg a day can significantly improve PMS mood changes and reduce weight gain, swelling of the hands and legs, breast tenderness, and abdominal bloating.

CAUTION: Anyone with heart or kidney disease should not take magnesium supplements without consulting their doctor.

** Herbal relief comes from taking agnus castus, which was reported in the British Medical Journal to significantly reduce PMS symptoms such as irritability, depression, headaches, and breast tenderness. Other popular remedies include Black Cohosh which is available in supplement form and used extensively in Germany for the treatment of PMS. Ginkgo Biloba extract can be helpful as well when you take 80 mg twice a day from day 16 of one menstrual cycle to day 5 of the next cycle.

** Eating well can make all the difference, so eat little and often rather than a large blow out meal twice a day. This will help stabilize your blood sugar, particularly if you suffer from bloating and swelling of the hands and feet, breast tenderness, and dizziness. You want to reduce your sugar and salt intake and increase potassium-rich foods such as fish, beans, and broccoli. Give up caffeine, including tea, and switch to something milder and herbal like Green Tea. Avoid alcohol as it can affect hormone metabolism which means that high levels of alcohol can make symptoms like anxiety, depression, and breast tenderness worse.

** Vitamins that have been used include vitamin E (300iu) and vitamin B6 around 100-200 mg per day and both can help reduce your overall symptoms.

** Get moving, even – and especially – when you least feel like it. The benefits of gentle exercise will help with your mood swings or depression and it’s the frequency of your exercise regime that will make all the difference. Again, little and often is best. In China, a study was conducted on women who increased their consumption of tea and found that the more of the caffeinated drink they consumed, the higher prevalence of symptoms.

Two Cancer Breakthroughs

The first breakthrough refers to women who have had breast cancer. The survival rate after treatment has improved, and it always helps to know about anything extra you can do to make those odds even better. One of the risk areas post breast cancer is that survivors have a lifetime risk for developing lymphedema as a result of surgery or radiotherapy. This is a chronic condition that occurs when lymphatic fluid builds up in the soft tissues of the body, usually in an arm or leg, as a result of damage or blockage in the lymph nodes and results in swelling of the affected limbs. Lymphedema is a risk for approximately two-thirds of breast cancer survivors in the 30 months after surgery and those who develop post-op swelling have a significantly higher risk of up to 40 percent. It is the second biggest concern, after the recurrence of the cancer itself, and if you are unfortunate enough to develop chronic lymphedema it can be difficult to treat. The swollen limbs can become vulnerable to infection from even a minor injury to the skin, such as a cut, scratch, insect bite, or even athlete’s foot. This condition is called lymphangitis and affects the connective tissue under the skin. Repeated infections can cause scarring that makes the tissue vulnerable to more swelling and infection. Unfortunately lymphedema can lay dormant and symptoms can occur 15 or more years following an injury to your lymphatic system. The good news is that one way to combat this problem is to ensure that there is no risk of seriously being overweight or obese after cancer treatment as a new study from the University of Missouri-Columbia, published on 2 January, found that the risk of developing lymphedema is 40-60 percent higher in women with a high BMI (Body Mass Index).

Breakthrough two is not ready to launch yet, but there is a way you can take action by utilising that old hospital visitor standby and taking a cancer patient a large bunch of grapes. Make sure they are white grapes, as The American Cancer Association has reported that researchers from the University of Kentucky have been feeding grape-seed extract to laboratory mice and found that it kills leukemia cells. Apparently it forces the damaged cells to commit cell suicide and does it effectively as the researchers found within 24 hours, 76 percent of such cells had died after being exposed to the extract. This isn’t the first time that grape seed extract has been tested for various types of cancer, but this is the first time it has been looked at in relation the blood and bone marrow cancer cells. The key factor is that the grape seed extract affects the cancer cells, but leaves normal cells alone.This research is at its early stages, but it’s a good reason to include grapes in your healthy five a day – just don’t peel them Beulah, eat them skin, seed and all.

Selenium has role in preventing high risk bladder cancer

Selenium is an essential trace element that we need for health, and now it seems it could play an important role in preventing high risk-bladder cancer for certain groups of people. Researchers from Dartmouth Medical School this month reported in a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research that although not true for everyone some groups who had been newly diagnosed with bladder cancer showed significant reductions in their cancer when they were found to have higher rates of selenium than average in their bodies. The groups affected were women, moderate smokers and those with p53 positive cancer. While other studies have shown a similar association between selenium and bladder cancer among women, this study is one of the first to show an association between selenium and p53 positive bladder cancer. Selenium is a trace element found widely in the environment and good food sources include Brazil nuts, bread, fish, meat and eggs Christmas excess – be prepared!.

Help for hormone headaches

If you have ever suffered from hormone headaches triggered by periods then you know how badly they can affect you – and those around you. Resorting to painkillers is not always the best answer and if you are looking for a more natural treatment then there is one that has been clinically proven to effectively deal with the pain for 96% of hormone headache sufferers.

It may be put down to your ‘moods’ but in reality it’s those fluctuating hormones that can cause the problem and they can occur at any point in a woman’s life from puberty to menopause. Hormone headaches generally affect only one side of the head, and the pain is often described as throbbing and can be accompanied by nausea and vomiting and may be made worse by bright light and loud noise.

A small study of 50 women aged 18 to 45 who reported regularly having hormone headaches were asked to test 4head, a natural plant-based, licensed medicine, to see if it helped reduce their headaches. On average, the volunteers had regularly suffered from hormonal headaches for more than 12 years, with a minimum of one year and a maximum of 30 years. An amazing 96% of the women in the study reported that the treatment relieved the pain, and in most cases the headache began to ease within 15 minutes. A previous clinical trial found it could begin working in just two minutes, and this was backed by this latest study.

Another point in 4head’s favour is the fact that up to a third of women don’t like taking tablets for headaches, and this product is applied directly to the forehead either as a stick or a patch. The active ingredient is pure levomenthol, which gives it a minty aroma when applied to the skin and the cooling/tingling effect effectively diverts the body’s attention away from the less bearable painful stimulus of the headache and blocks the pain signals. At the same time, the levomenthol helps to relax tense muscles in the head that are associated with tension type headaches.

Given the symptoms of hormone headaches, it ought to prove helpful for migraines as well. Available at pharmacies and many supermarkets.

Breast cancer treatment optimism

News from Greece has confirmed that the new chemotherapy agents are cutting advanced breast cancer mortality in half. This reassuring news comes from a review of published studies, by John P. A. Ioannidis, M.D., of the University of Ioannina, and reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. They looked at 122 clinical trials involving 26,031 patients and 22 different types of therapy.

Their conclusion was that the advent of the new anthracycline drugs led to a 22% reduction in mortality risk compared with older nonanthracycline drugs, and that the introduction of taxanes resulted in a 33% risk reduction compared with older single-agent therapy. Taken together this means that the newer taxane-based combination treatments such as those involving capecitabine (Xeloda), or gemcitabine (Gemzar), have reduced mortality by 51% compared to the single-agent treatment in use 35 years ago.

Now I know chemotherapy is not the favoured option for many people and they choose to go on any of the alternative routes from Chinese Medicine to Spiritual healing, however, if you are undergoing chemotherapy there is an excellent homoeopathic remedy that can help alleviate some of the side effects. Many homoeopathic chemists have their own variation so ask locally or I can recommend an excellent chemist in Dorset who make their own tablets and are happy to speak with you on the phone about your requirements. They are the Galen pharmacy and their telephone number is 01305 263996 or if you would like to read more about natural treatments for cancer a book I recommend is Say No to Cancer by Patrick Holford and an interesting website to check out is www.cancertruth.net which is American but will give you some food for thought.

PS – if you or someone you know has been affected by cancer, then here’s a chance to walk, jog, run and have fun at 5k events across the UK, to help raise as much money as possible to beat cancer. Women only can run, but men are very welcome as supporters, coaches and fundraisers at Cancer Research UK’s Race for Life events taking place in 2009. If you are interested, they are open for entries on 19 January and for more information visit www.raceforlife.org or call 0871 641 2282

Men – Relinquish that duvet!

The nightly battle of the duvet is an unreported phenomena of sharing a bed – and women seem to come off worse. No one has yet shelled out research money to find out why even the smallest and slightest of men has the grip of a stevedore when it comes to holding onto the duvet and hauling it over to their side of the bed – and I am sure someone will manage to get a grant after I have mentioned it! Well, appealing to your better nature chaps, although there is a lot of variation in how individuals feel the cold depending on a number of factors such as age, fitness, diet and sleep pattern there is one factor that is constant. Women tend to feel the cold more than men do – although I would say menopausal women are exempt from this as hot flushes can heat an entire room never mind a double bed.

Happily there is an expert to tell us why, and according to Mike Tipton, Professor of Human Physiology at the University of Portsmouth, it’s because we evolved on the Equator which makes us creatures of the Tropics. Since we all moved out to explore the world with our cooking pots and mammoths on a string, we have learned to reproduce our hot homeland by learning how to build fires and inventing central heating.

Although we feel hot and cold throughout the day, our core body temperature – that of our vital organs – is always kept at about 37C and we must maintain that level for survival. Just a 2C drop can cause hypothermia, a 12C drop results in death. If you want to keep, and feel, warm this winter you need to concentrate on your hands and feet. This is particularly important for women as research shows that they are better at conserving heat than men because they have a more evenly distributed fat layer and can pull all their blood back to their core organs. It’s thought that women do this because they carry less fat and muscle mass than men, and so need a more efficient technique of protecting their core body temperature. Next time someone suggests you are a bit overweight try blaming your core organs, it’s much more effective that saying you just can’t resist an extra biscuit.

BUT, because women operate in this way it means that less blood flows to their hands and feet, and as a result they feel cold – certainly colder than men usually do.

There are a number of factors that can affect how cold women feel, menopause obviously is one and so are various points of the menstrual cycle where the core body temperature can often vary by more than 1C. Most of us recognise that when we are tired we are also more sensitive to changes in temperature and feel the cold more, and as our body temperature falls at night, that’s when we women feel it most as they reach their minimum body temperature quicker than men.

Exercise lowers post menopausal breast cancer risk

Breast cancer is a serious concern for women, and anything we can do to minimise that risk has got to be good news – especially when it’s natural, and free. An eleven year follow up study from the National Cancer Institute in the USA on over 23,000 women, appears to suggests that women who reported the highest levels of physical activity had an almost 20% lower risk of breast cancer compared with women who exercised the least. Two pointers here: the activity has to be vigorous or it appears to have no influence on reducing the risk, and the benefits were seen only in women who were fairly slim. As postmenopausal women have a tendency to put on weight, it seems as though combining exercise with a sensible diet might also be in order.

The survey defined vigorous activity to include scrubbing floors, chopping wood, and running or fast jogging. Though obviously not at the same time – how many women in the States still chop wood? They also defined non-vigorous exercise as activities including washing clothes, lawn mowing, and walking. They obviously have much more powerful lawn powers in the US that do all the work for you, rather than the old push-me pull-you mowers of my childhood which no one could define as non-vigorous as the aching back and arms afterwards would testify.

The message is clear; if you want to avoid post-menopausal breast cancer – especially if you have any history of it in your family – you could start by walking briskly to the nearest salsa class and then jogging home.

BUT!!!!!!!

If you are thinking of taking up running the marathon – as many do to help breast cancer charities – then please approach with caution and do it under professional supervision. Why? Well, there is now accumulating evidence from recent studies that pushing your body to run 26.2 miles can cause at least minor injury to your heart.

Dr Arthur Siege is director of internal medicine at Harvard’s McLean Hospital in, Massachusetts – and he has run 20 marathons. He is the ideal man to study the subject and he has published many studies on the health consequences of marathons. His main conclusions that you might want to think about before you strap on the running shoes are that the physical effects of running a marathon include changes in your immune system and kidney function, but obviously your muscles take the worst punishment. The further you run then your muscles stiffen and this can result in injury-signalling enzymes leaking through the heart membrane, and that is consistent with significant stress on the heart.

CO Q10, How to boost levels by 4 X plus

Coenzyme Q10, (COQ 10) is a nutrient that occurs naturally in the body and plays a key part in metabolizing energy from food. It is essential in the production of energy in your body, and is found in large concentrations in those tissues that use a lot of energy, such as your heart. It has a whole host of health benefits associated with it, particularly in the area of heart disease, but current research is also showing its application in other areas such as those below:

* Migraine prevention – a 2002 study reported that 61% of patients treated with CoQ10 as a migraine preventive reported 50% fewer migraines at the end of three months. * Chronic fatigue – those deficient in CoQ10 reported higher levels of energy when supplementing withthan those with deficient levels of the enzyme.

* Hypertension reduced – patients with high blood pressure taking CO Q10 were compared to similar patients on heart medication and were found to have exactly the same reduction in levels – without the side effects of the drugs. * Heart transplants patients benefit – patients given CO Q10 regularly before their surgery were found in a 2004 study to have a significant improvement in functional status, clinical symptoms, and quality of life.

* Parkinson’s Disease damage reduced – only a small study has been undertaken so far, but it appears that patients with the highest levels of CO Q10 showed significantly less impairment to their motor functions than those on lower doses.

* Statins – those taking statins often show a low rate of CO Q10 and may be advised to supplement as these drugs work to block cholesterol and have the potential to block the production of CoQ10 and reduce levels further.

As we get older, the levels of CO Q10 we naturally produce in the body tend to be less, for a number of reasons. There may simply not be enough CIO Q10 in our diet – we get it mostly from oily fish, meat and whole grains – or we can no longer effectively produce or synthesize adequate amounts of it ourselves. Further factors include the external effect of illness, and stress

Now it appears there is another way of increasing your CO Q10 levels, and it’s absolutely free. It’s our old friend exercise that is the key factor, as a recent study from the Lancisi Heart Institute in Italy has shown. They divided their subjects into four groups:

* Group one received 100 mg of supplemental CoQ10 three times each day

* Group two received the same, plus supervised exercise five times each week

* Group three received a placebo

* Group four received a placebo and participated in the same exercise routine as group two.

They were supervised for four weeks, and the results were very positive for the combination of exercise and CO Q10. Those in Group one, who just took the supplement had their blood levels of CoQ10 boosted four-fold – which is impressive in itself. However, those who were in Group 2 had their levels raised even further while there was no difference at all for Groups 3 and 4.

As the greatest concentration is found around your heart, it makes sense to have some aerobic exercise that will make that muscle work harder. Good brisk walking, or take a look at the health tips what I think is an ideal form of exercise for everyone, regardless of age or fitness.

Vitamin K, helps women fight heart disease

Hardening of the arteries is a major concern for many, particularly as they get older, but new research has good news for women – sorry chaps but it doesn’t help you much apparently. It’s just been reported in the journal Atherosclerosis, that women who have the highest levels of vitamin K2 have the greatest protection against hardening of the arteries.

The researchers examined the diets of women in their 60s and found that vitamin K2 reduced hardening of the arteries by as much as 20 percent and the more K2, the better. We tend to be encouraged to eat more of the K1 vitamins, which are found primarily in leafy green vegetables, as they have plenty of other health benefits but they don’t provide any K2. The best sources are cheese and milk products and some from meat. These of course can be sources of cholesterol and fats, so don’t switch your diet completely – remember everything in moderation is the very best health advice.

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