Word: estrogen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...JEROME SULLIVAN TOLD YOU SO. MORE THAN A decade ago, the South Carolina medical researcher came up with a theory explaining why young women rarely have heart attacks. It isn't that they are protected by the hormone estrogen, as conventional wisdom had it, said Sullivan, but that they lose iron every month during menstrual bleeding. And iron, he believed, promotes heart attacks. Now a study from Finland, published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, has provided strong evidence that he was right...
Postmenopausal women often get osteoporosis, a weakening of the bones that can lead to easy fracture. A report in Science may explain why. A drop-off in the hormone estrogen leads to an overproduction of osteoclasts, cells whose job is to scour away aging bone cells. Trouble is, other cells called osteoblasts, which fill in the holes left by osteoclasts, don't increase proportionately. If humans respond the same way as lab mice, new drugs could supersede current estrogen-replacement therapy, which can cause fluid retention and leg cramps...
...cynic might see the silicone-implant business as another malfeasance on the scale of the Dalkon Shield (which had a tendency to cause devastating infections), DES (which could cause cancer in the user's offspring) or the high-estrogen birth-control pill (which was also rushed to market after hasty and dubious testing). A cynic might point to the medical profession's long habit of exploiting the female body for profit -- from the 19th century custom of removing the ovaries as a cure for "hysteria" to our more recent traditions of unnecessary hysterectomies and caesareans. A cynic might conclude that...
What made the psychologists really sit up and take notice, however, was the fact that the women scored much better on the mental-rotation test while they were menstruating. Specifically, they improved their scores by 50% to 100% whenever their estrogen levels were at their lowest. It is not clear why this should be. However, Silverman and Eals are trying to find out if women exhibit a similar hormonal effect for any other visual tasks...
...drug's benefits were clear in both young and old patients. Most surprising, tamoxifen seemed to help even those women whose tumors were not of the type whose growth depends on estrogen. "The drug probably has other mechanisms of action," says Dr. Andrew Dorr of the National Cancer Institute. "It may be a tumor suppressor in and of itself...