The Merits of Menopause

For most women, the "change of life" is not an easy one. The symptoms of menopause--mood swings, hot flashes and night sweats--can be intense, not to mention embarrassing, and in many cases they can interfere with daily life.

But there may be a healthy upside to those hot flashes, according to the latest research. It turns out that women who have these episodes in their 50s or 60s, the typical age range for menopausal symptoms, also have an 11% lower risk of heart disease over the next 10 years, compared with women who don't suffer the same symptoms. And because heart-disease risk increases in women's postmenopausal years as levels of the heart-protective hormone estrogen decline, this risk reduction is potentially lifesaving. Researchers don't know why the symptoms may reduce heart risk, but they theorize that the blood-vessel activity that occurs during flushing primes the heart and vessels to combat plaque buildup and hardening of arteries.

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You're Kidding! Medical Clown Increases Pregnancy Rates with IVF

A study of 229 Israeli women undergoing in-vitro fertilization (IVF) to treat infertility found that a 15-minute visit from a trained "medical clown" immediately after the embryos were placed in the womb increased the chance of pregnancy to 36%, compared with 20% for women whose embryo transfer was comedy-free.

After controlling for factors such as the women's age, the nature and duration of their infertility, the number of embryos used and the day on which they were transferred into the uterus, researchers found an even greater effect of therapeutic laughter: the women who were entertained by a clown were 2.67 times more likely to get pregnant than those in the control group.

The quasi-randomized controlled study was published in one of the leading journals on infertility research, Fertility and Sterility, and led by Israeli researcher Shevach Friedler.

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Would an Ectopic Pregnancy Show Up in a Pregnancy Test?

An ectopic pregnancy will give you a positive pregnancy test, as the hormone produced still gets into the blood stream. If you have a negative pregnancy test, would be very unlikely to be an ectopic, but there are rare situations when this can happen.

As well as a positive pregnancy test, typical symptoms for an ectopic pregnancy include:

• Pain, which is usually one-sided but may be more generalised.

• Bleeding - this is usually not very heavy and may be just a brown loss. The blood loss is thought to be due to the low hormone levels made by an ectopic, which allows the lining of the uterus to come away. • Fainting or dizziness, which may be due to internal bleeding lowering the blood pressure. Shoulder-tip pain. Blood in the abdomen can irritate nerves which are shared by the skin over the shoulder area.

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PARENTAL INFERTILITY AND CEREBRAL PALSY IN CHILDREN BORN SPONTANEOUSLY OR AFTER IVF/ICSI

Doctors have known for some time that children born after fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilisation (IVF) or intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) are at increased risk of cerebral palsy. However, it was not known whether this risk was due to the treatment itself, the higher frequency of preterm or multiple births, or a mechanism associated with couples' underlying infertility.

Now, new research published online in the journal Human Reproduction indicates that underlying infertility is not the main reason for the increased risk seen in IVF/ICSI children.

The study led by Dr. Jin Liang Zhu, an epidemiologist at the Danish Epidemiology Science Centre at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, is the first to examine the association between the time it takes a couple to achieve a pregnancy and the risk of cerebral palsy.

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