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Menopause is in the midst of a makeover. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) plans to issue a scientific consensus statement soon that will urge women and their doctors to stop thinking of menopause--technically, the year after the last menstrual cycle--as some kind of disease. If that conclusion seems obvious to you, perhaps you missed all the medical drama and debate about the benefits, or lack thereof, of trying to replace the body's faltering production of hormones over the long term. Some believe that anyone who takes estrogen is a dupe of the pharmaceutical companies, while others...
...mood swings and fuzzy thinking, despite lots of anecdotal reports, is less clear. "One of the challenges of this research is teasing out which symptoms are associated with menopause and which are simply the result of aging," says Dr. Carol Mangione, the UCLA professor of medicine who led the NIH panel. The point is, if you need relief, hormone replacement is worth considering. It's best to start with as low a dose as is effective. But many women find they do just fine without it. --By Christine Gorman
...grants were given to projects that were considered of exceptional novelty; high risk, high impact efforts that would be difficult to fund through the NIH due to either the early stage of the science or the involvement of human [embryonic stem] cells restricted by government regulations,” he said. “The NIH is an inherently conservative institution funding long term projects that have already demonstrated a substantial record of success—this is a very powerful mechanism for sustaining research, but not for enabling innovation...
...NIH spends over $30 billion a year supporting research,” he said. “We will invest our money where there is the most impact—$150,000 is not a huge sum, but it’s not a trivial sum either...
People who object on moral grounds to research using human embryonic stem cells might be surprised to learn that scientists too are struggling with ethical dilemmas. In the past when a controversial new technology came along--recombinant DNA, for example--the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would set the scientific and ethical standards for research. But with embryonic stem cells (ESCs), the NIH has been hamstrung by President Bush's 2001 order allowing it to fund only research using the limited and imperfect cell lines already in existence--not exactly cutting-edge science. Relegated to a minor role...