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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USE OF MILD PAINKILLERS IN PREGNANCY LINKED TO INCREASED RISK OF MALE REPRODUCTIVE PROBLEMS, NEW EVIDENCE SHOWS

New evidence has emerged that the use of mild painkillers such as paracetamol, aspirin and ibuprofen, may be part of the reason for the increase in male reproductive disorders in recent decades. Research published in the journal Human Reproduction shows that women who took a combination of more than one mild analgesic during pregnancy, or who took the painkillers during the second trimester of pregnancy, had an increased risk of giving birth to sons with undescended testicles (cryptorchidism) -- a condition that is known to be a risk factor for poor semen quality and testicular germ cell cancer in later life.

The researchers from Denmark, Finland and France found that women who used more than one painkiller simultaneously (e.g. paracetamol and ibuprofen) had a seven-fold increased risk of giving birth to sons with some form of cryptorchidism compared to women who took nothing.

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