|
Women's Issues
Written and researched by Bob Murray, PhD
Latest News |
Back Issues | Get updates:
Subscribe Now
Exercise Sharpens the Minds of Aging Women
July 30, 2001
A study by Kristine Yaffie, a psychiatrist and neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, shows that, amongst other things, for every mile that women walked each day they lowered their risk of mental decline by 13%. Interestingly, the speed of the walk was not a factor.
The researchers tracked almost 6000 healthy women of 65 or older living in planned retirement communities. Their mental faculties and level of exercise were evaluated over a 6 to 8 year period. Those who took the most exercise -- measured in calories expended in walking, gardening or more rigorous activities -- were 26% less likely to develop cognitive decline than those who exercised least.
The report, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, said that at least one in 10 people over 65, and 50% of those over 85, develop some form of cognitive impairment ranging from mild mental deficits to dementia.
"Further research is needed to determine if physical activity programs could prevent clinically significant cognitive impairment and if our findings can be replicated in other populations," Yaffie wrote.
I am sure that exercise can help in preventing mental decline. However I am also positive that the real problem lies in the loss of a role after a certain age, whether that role is work-related or family-related. This loss of purpose in life is one of the reasons that depression is an increasing problem for the elderly and I am sure that the loss of cognitive ability is related to this. In hunter-gatherer societies people become more important as they age and are revered for their wisdom and experience. Not so in the Western world. Giving the elderly a meaningful role (which doesn't mean going back to work at MacDonalds) is one of the real challenges of our century. BM
Read more in the Archives of Internal Medicine
Top of page
Hold That Baby While I Check Your Insurance
April 29, 2001
The most effective medication for pain relief during labor is the epidural, an anaesthetic injected into the epidural space surrounding the spinal cord. It eliminates pain, allows the mother to remain awake and has no effect on the newborn. Whether a laboring woman receives an epidural or other pain control, however, depends on her insurance type, a University at Buffalo study has found.
Results of the study show that women who are residents of New York State and covered by Medicaid are less than half as likely to receive an epidural for vaginal delivery than mothers with HMO or private coverage. Further, Medicaid recipients undergoing cesarean section were twice as likely as mothers with HMO or private coverage to receive general anaesthesia, which renders the mother unconscious and increases the risk of adverse effects on the mother and her baby.
Results of the study showed considerable variation among women with vaginal deliveries in the use of either no anaesthesia or epidural anaesthesia, based on the type of insurance. During vaginal delivery, 18 percent of women with HMO coverage and 21 percent with private insurance received an epidural, compared to about 9 percent of Medicaid mothers. Among those receiving no anaesthesia for vaginal delivery, however, Medicaid mothers dominated, with 36 percent compared to 18 percent of women with HMO coverage and 22 percent with private insurance.
The real importance of this study, apart from highlighting the absurd differences in treatments, lies elsewhere. Pain and stress that a mother feels, either during delivery or prenatally, are passed on to the infant in the form of an increase in stress hormones in their systems. This may lead to high levels of anxiety and stress in later life, or even to depression. It could mean that your chances of developing depressive symptoms depend on your mother's choice of, or ability to afford, certain insurance policies. Absurd, isn't it? BM
Reported in Uniscience
Top of page
Women's Shoes: The Height of Folly
April 10, 2001
OK, so we know stillettos, with their high, narrow heels are no-nos and increase a specific knee-joint pressure called the varus torque. Increased joint pressures have been linked to the development of arthritis. But now it seems that shoes with high, wide, heels may be even worse.
A study done by Casey Kerrigan and colleagues at Harvard Medical School tested 20 healthy women who were comfortable wearing shoes with seven centimetre-high wide or narrow heels walked 10 metres wearing the shoes, and barefoot. The narrow-based heels were an average of 1.2 centimetres wide, and the wide-based heels 4.5 centimetres.
Wide heels increased the varus torque by 26 per cent, compared with 22 per cent for the stillettos. "We have shown that wide-heeled, women's dress shoes cause the same, if not greater, alterations in knee torques as narrow-heeled shoes," says Kerrigan.
The new findings have particular importance for the development of knee osteoarthritis because "women tend to wear these wide-heeled dress shoes routinely and for longer periods of time," he says. "We recommend wearing low or preferably no heels."
Although barefoot walking imposes the same forces on the knee in women and men, knee osteoarthritis is twice as common in women. Wearing high heels could explain this, says Kerrigan.
Once again we see that the further we get from our hunter-gatherer ways of doing things the more trouble we cause ourselves. BM
Reported in New Scientist
Top of page
Prolonged Breast Feeding May be Bad for Baby
March 16, 2001
Two studies released this week show that prolonged breast feeding may not be the best idea.
The first by researchers at Bristol (UK) University showed that children should be introduced to more solid food between the ages of six to nine months. Otherwise they become fussy eaters. Researchers have found that it is during this period that a baby's taste buds expanded and they became ready for a more varied diet.
But if there was a delay beyond nine months this didn't happen and so the child developed a much smaller range of taste choices.
More seriously a team from the Medical Research Council Childhood Nutrition Research Centre at the Institute for Child Health in London found that prolonged breast feeding could lead to an increased risk of developing heart disease later in life.
Neither study advocated that breast feeding should be abandoned altogether. Breast feeding can help a baby fight off infections, and is thought to aid brain development. It has also been shown to have some benefits for cardiovascular health. However the MRC researchers found that people who had been breast fed for longer than four months as babies had stiffer arteries than those who had been breast fed for less than four months, or who had been bottle fed. Every extra two months of breast feeding also led to a rise in cholesterol levels and blood pressure.
Read more on BBC News
And more on BBC News
Top of page
One in Five Women Assaulted
March 6, 2001
According to Amnesty International one in every five women in the world is the victim of assault. Every day millions of women are subject to torture, rape and battery, mostly by family members or employers. The blame, says Amnesty, lies with a "global culture which denies equal rights with men, and which legitimizes violence against women." For many women "their home is a place of terror."
Citing World Bank figures, Amnesty says one in five women have been physically or sexually assaulted. "Official reports in the United States say a woman is battered every 15 seconds and 700,000 are raped each year. In India more than 40% of married women report being kicked, slapped or sexually abused. In Egypt, 35% of women have reported being beaten by their husbands."
Our clinical experience in Australia and in the US confirms the Amnesty study. Routinely we find that women are offered little or no police protection and there are few places a battered women can go for safety. BM
Read more on BBC News
Top of page
Orgasms at the Push of a Button
February 7, 2001
This gets put in the 'only in America' file. American scientists have found they can create orgasms in women at the touch of a button.
The earth-shattering discovery was made by Dr Stuart Meloy, a pain relief surgeon in North Carolina. Dr Meloy said his discovery had been a complete chance.
The good doctor was performing a routine pain-relief operation on a woman's spine when he made the finding. "We implant electrodes into the spine and use electrical pulses to modify the pain signals passing along the nerves," he said. According to Dr Meloy, patients remain conscious throughout the procedure to help the surgeons decide where the best place to put the electrodes are to maximise pain relief.
His breakthrough came when he failed to hit the right pain relief spot for a patient. "I was placing the electrodes and suddenly the woman started exclaiming emphatically," he said. "I asked her what was up and she said, 'You're going to have to teach my husband to do that.'"
Dr Meloy said the stimulating wires could be connected to a signal generator, smaller than a packet of cigarettes, which could be put under the patient's buttocks. The patient would then be given a hand control to trigger the orgasms.
But Dr Meloy said he envisaged the device only be used in the most extreme of cases, to help couples blighted by orgasmic dysfunction.
Oh, yes? BM
Read more on BBC News
Top of page
Heart Attacks Are Not Just a 'Guy Thing'
February 6, 2001
Heart attacks are usually thought of as a 'guy thing', but, if current research is to be believed, that will all change. More women die of heart failure than men. In fact, according to a leading researcher U-M Health System cardiologist and assistant professor of internal medicine Dr. Claire Duvernoy. "More women die of heart disease in the US than die of all forms of cancer combined."
"Women tend to develop serious heart problems about 10 years later than men do, but they live longer overall, and advanced age is a risk factor for heart disease. So is menopause -- possibly due in part to the fact that a woman's level of estrogen, which seems to protect the cardiovascular system, decreases as she approaches and enters menopause."
Duvernoy's own research focuses on the effect of estrogen on blood flow in small blood vessels.
Women are also more likely than men to have the kind of chronic health problems, like obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure that can harm the cardiovascular system over time. More girls and women are smoking at younger ages, posing a long-term risk to their heart. All of these factors can remove the heart-risk advantage that younger women have over men their age. These "co-morbidities", or existing conditions, not only help cause heart disease -- they can also make a woman who has heart disease harder to treat and less likely to do well after treatment.
Part of the problem in American health care as a whole, Duvernoy says, is that doctors and other health care providers have the same skewed perceptions as women themselves. They may not be as quick to consider heart problems as a possible cause of a woman's symptoms, or they may not treat a woman's condition as aggressively as they would a man's. Another problem involves actual differences in the way women experience, react to and report symptoms. For example women who have a heart attack sometimes don't even realize what's happening to them. They may report their warning signs as general malaise, nausea, abdominal pain or excessive fatigue, which don't match the chest pain, gray color and sweatiness that are widely thought of as a heart attack's "typical" symptoms.
What, then, should women do to prevent heart failure? According to Duvernoy there are a few steps all women should take:
- Exercise regularly, whether it's walking your dog, doing aerobics or
Repatterning Movements. There has been a lot of research showing that these are some of the best weapons against heart attacks and they also make the body more supple and less stressed.
- Eat a heart-healthy diet, watching your fat and cholesterol intake.
- Don't smoke, or if you already do, quit.
- Get regular medical checkups, including blood pressure checks and blood tests.
- Control your weight, especially if you have diabetes.
- If you have diabetes, control your blood sugar to help cut your high risk of heart disease.
- Monitor your blood pressure, and if you already know it's high, take your medication.
- Keep track of the levels of 'good' and 'bad' cholesterol in your blood -- women whose levels of these substances are out of balance are more likely to develop a heart problem than men.
- If you're an African-American or Hispanic woman, realize that your risk is even greater than that of white women, and work hard on prevention.
- Don't count on hormone replacement therapy to reduce your heart risk after menopause.
- If you've had a heart attack, make sure you follow rehabilitation recommendations.
Reported in Daily University Science News
Top of page
When Women Can Read Maps
January 20, 2001
For years women have been the butt of male jokes about their inability to read maps. Indeed we worked with a couple in America recently who said that one of their main problems was that the woman habitually got lost driving or couldn't be relied upon to read a map.
Now, however, researchers at the Ruhr-Universtitat in Bochum, Germany, have discovered that a woman's spatial ability, and hence her ability to read maps, actually increases during her period. (These findings were reported on the BBC News Online on Jan 14).
During most of her monthly cycle higher levels of the female hormone oestrogen are present and these were linked to lower scores on such things as direction finding and map reading. But when levels of the male hormone testosterone were higher, as during their period, women did better.
The interesting evolutionary question is why was it necessary for women to be better spatially orientated during their periods? Any ideas?
Top of page
At Last, a Way to Beat the Period Blues!
January 20, 2001
An item reported the British Medical Journal on January 19 caught our eye. German researcher Rued Schellenberg from the Institute of Care and Science, has discovered that the extract of agnus castus fruit taken over three months can greatly help women who suffer from mood swings, anger, headaches and sore breasts associated with the menstrual cycle.
More than half of the 86 women given the extract had an improvement in their condition and the side effects were few and mild. The fruits of the plant, also known as the "chaste tree" because it was thought to promote chastity by reducing libido, is made up of compounds similar in structure to the sex hormones.
Why is it that scientists are always coming up with treatments that reduce women's libido (antidepressants are a case in point)? Are they all men?
Read the full report on the agnus castus fruit trials in the British Medical Journal (Jan 19, 2001)
Top of page
A Mother's Emotional State Can Effect Her Unborn Child
October 30, 2000
Women who worry a lot during pregnancy may be reducing the flow of blood to their wombs. A report in the British Medical Journal noted research that showed that the arteries of anxious mothers-to-be were narrower than a control group of less anxious mums-in-waiting. The reason is that the anxious women were producing more noradrenaline, a hormone which can narrow arteries. The finding supports the theory which we have been propounding for many years that a woman's emotional state can have a lasting effect on the health, and the mental development, of her foetus.
Top of page
RELATED LINKS
Check our event schedule for workshops and seminars.
About the Author
Dr Bob Murray is a widely published psychologist and expert on emotional health and optimal relationships. Together with his wife and long-term collaborator Alicia Fortinberry, he is founder of the highly successful Uplift Program, and author of Raising an Optimistic Child (McGraw-Hill, 2006) and Creating Optimism (McGraw-Hill, 2004).
Do you like our site? Recommend this page to a friend!
|
