Word: estrogen
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Tamoxifen's effectiveness stems from the fact that the proliferation of breast-cancer cells in two-thirds of older women seems dependent on estrogen, the female sex hormone. The drug acts by blocking receptors for estrogen on the surfaces of cells that have migrated from the breast tumor, thus halting the division of the cells and preventing them from seeding tumors in other parts of the body. Unlike conventional chemotherapy, which usually causes loss of hair and severe nausea, tamoxifen produces only minor side effects, such as hot flashes and mild nausea, and only in about one-quarter of patients...
...protective influence of heavy smoking, which may result from its effect on estrogen levels, is confined to postmenopausal women. Younger women who smoke stand the same chance of getting uterine cancer as those who abstain. Even for older women the benefit is as evanescent as, well, smoke. Any protection against uterine cancer that smoking offers, scientists say, is far outweighed by the enhanced risk of developing cancers of the throat, stomach, bladder, pancreas and lungs, as well as heart disease, emphysema and bronchitis. Comments Dr. Harvey Fineberg, dean of the faculty of the Harvard School of Public Health: "To smoke...
...thirds of his career trying to help women overcome infertility, he became alarmed at the specter of world overpopulation and began working on a hormonal birth control method in the 1950s with Biologists Gregory Pincus and Min-chueh Chang. Because the pill they developed used two body substances, estrogen and progesterone, Rock, a daily Mass-going Roman Catholic, believed the church might accept it as a "natural" family-planning device. When Pope Paul VI banned all forms of artificial contraception in a 1968 encyclical, Rock angrily accused the Pope of abdicating "responsibility for the ultimate welfare...
...drug, leuprolide, will provide an alternative to predominant techniques of castration and DES estrogen therapy, according to associate professor Marc B. Garnick, who conducted the study appearing in today's New England Journal of Medicine...
Other surveys have found that such athletic women as distance runners, dancers and joggers can suffer temporary infertility. The reason is that their body fat sometimes becomes too low for the production of the critical hormone estrogen. Stress can also suppress ovulation; women executives often miss two or three consecutive menstrual periods...