Word: progestin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bloodstream soon after the end of menstruation somehow prevented ovulation. A few years later, Pincus and Rock were working together to find a way of helping subfertile women ovulate, and thus conceive. They first had to regularize the woman's cycle, and they hit upon a synthetic progestin chemically akin to another female sex hormone, progesterone. The progestin, taken for 20 days in mid-menstrual cycle, suppressed ovulation by simulating pregnancy. Taken off the medicine, the women had a more normal cycle, with surer ovulation. After Pincus and Rock had produced a gratifying number of conceptions, a new idea...
...detectable estrogen. Apparently estrogen, even in the most minute quantity, prevented some side effects, including unwanted bleeding. So when Chicago's G. D. Searle & Co., which had worked closely with Pincus and Rock, began making "the Pincus pills" as Enovid in 1957, the formulation contained 66 parts progestin to one part estrogen. The progestin dose has been reduced by as much as 90% in Searle's newest pills, Ovulen, but the combination principle is the same...
...level is fairly steady, except for a dip at the time of ovulation. If they could prevent this dip, the researchers reasoned, they could prevent ovulation. They felt it would be more natural to do this by providing nothing but added estrogen until the 20th day, and then giving progestin only briefly. San Antonio Researcher Dr. Joseph W. Goldzieher worked with Syntex Laboratories to develop the resulting "sequentials." Beginning with Day 5, the woman takes a white estrogen pill for 15 days, then a distinctively colored
...progestin (with a protective smidgen of estrogen added) for five or six days. The sequentials, like the combinations, tend to regularize the cycle, and most women who take them have an acceptably mild menstrual period...
...virtually every case-and suspected in the others-that she has skipped a pill or two. The failure rate is slightly higher on the sequentials, apparently because the estrogen taken early in the cycle wears off rapidly, and a single day's missed pill may spell pregnancy. The progestin combinations afford a slightly broader margin of safety...