Word: breast
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...talking about Reta Winters, the heroine of her new novel, Unless, but she isn't being cruel--or if she is, it's because life itself is cruel. Shields needed something terrible to happen to Reta because something terrible was happening to her. Shields, 66, is dying of breast cancer, and Unless will be her last word...
...Breast cancer is a prime example. For more than two decades, women with early-stage, estrogen-sensitive breast cancers have been treated with surgery followed by a combination of tamoxifen and chemotherapy. Adding tamoxifen seemed to make sense, since it blocks estrogen's cancer-promoting effects. It turns out, however, that tamoxifen may act as a spoiler, preventing the chemotherapy agents from entering cancer cells and doing their job. In a paper being presented this week, researchers will report on a finding that should change the way doctors treat patients from now on; after eight years of follow-up exams...
What is it about breast milk that makes babies so smart? Reinisch suspects there is a component of mother's milk that either protects the central nervous system or stimulates its development. The likeliest candidate: a long-chain polyunsaturated acid known as DHA that is found in human milk but not in infant formula or cow's milk. Today's infant formulas, by the way, are fortified with a precursor of DHA called ala and may offer some of the same benefits...
...there may be a subtler explanation for why breast-fed babies are smarter. Think of the duration of breast-feeding as a measure of the interest, time and energy that a mother is willing to invest in the child during the whole upbringing period. As the authors note, it may be that "mothers who spend more time breast-feeding during the first year of life also spend more time later interacting with the child...
Whatever the reason, the bottom line is the same. "If you can breast-feed, do it," says Reinisch. For the record, Reinisch is a very smart woman with a Ph.D., yet she was never breast-fed. I was breast-fed only briefly, and while I think I probably could have used a few extra IQ points, my mother assures me that I turned out just fine...