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Pee in a Cup
July 31, 2009 - Friday
Posted by admin
That’s all it takes, suggests a recent study on bmj.com, to determine if you have an STD which could stand in the way of you successfully conceiving a child. Chlamydia is the most common STD in the United States and it can lead to serious long term health complications in women, including infertility. Guys, you’re not far behind. Recent studies show it may also cause infertility in men. When I say recent, I mean yesterday.
And, as part of The AFA’s male reproductive health program, now underway with several other “A-listers” like the Society for the Study of Male Reproduction (SSMR) - an official branch of the American Urological Association, Men’s Health Network, and the CDC, an extensive amount of research is currently being launched to determine the best ways to educate younger men and the most effective ways to approach them with that education. We have a lot of work to do, without a doubt, but all of us are really excited about making an impact in this area. In addition to STD prevention, we’re going to be looking at the effects of environmental toxins, steroid and other drug use and testicular self-exams as a way to get guys more “in touch” with their own reproductive health.
Five minutes with your doctor and a urine sample are all it takes to “flush out” (sorry, it’s Friday and I’ve been caffeine-free for two weeks) the possibility of carrying an undiagnosed STD. If you want some incentive to do so, while getting a European vacation out of the deal, head to the UK where you’ll get an iPod just to get tested for STDs. Seriously. This is a real program and you may read about it here.
Read Article about STD Testing:
Simple Urine Test Could Help Cut Chlamydia in Men
Brian Armentrout
Communications Director
The American Fertility Association
Categories
Family Building •
Fertility •
Fertility Preservation •
Infertility •
Male Factor •
Reproductive Health •
Sexual Health
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Happy Birthday Jackie O
July 30, 2009 - Thursday
Posted by Corey
This month would have marked the 80th birthday of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. I have always been fascinated with Jackie O - I’ve had two Jackie sightings in my life. One, on a beach in Negril (1975, wearing a tie dyed tee shirt over a bathing suit) and once on Madison Avenue (1977, wearing her signature large sunglasses and head scarf).
Jackie really was American royalty. Her outward persona when President Kennedy was assassinated has been discussed unendingly since 1963. Less discussed has been her miscarriage in 1955, and her still birth, in 1956.
Jackie has always fascinated me. Like all celebrities today, we know so many things about her that are simply none of our business to know. But having had a miscarriage myself, this has always been the piece of Jackie history that I have held onto when I needed to call up a bit of courage.
I remember years ago, speaking to Grandma Rita (Whelan) when she was in her early seventies. She started to tell me about her miscarriage, some fifty years earlier but couldn’t get through it because she choked up. It’s a horribly painful experience for a woman to bear, whether it is tied to a larger story of personal infertility or not. My own miscarried baby would have been a boy.
Those who miscarry are part of a large group, a universal family of women who know, and understand. I came across this list, by no means complete, of our more famous sisters who count this as part of their life experience:
http://in-their-honor.blogspot.com/
If you need to know the company you are in, please visit it, and know that you are not alone.
Happy birthday Jackie O. What a life you lived. Thank you.
Corey Whelan
Program Director
The American Fertility Association
Categories
Infertility •
Miscarriage •
Pregnancy Loss
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Green Birth Control?? What About Green Hamburgers?
July 29, 2009 - Wednesday
Posted by admin
By Jennifer Rogers
Created Jul 28 2009 - 7:00am
Green seems to be the color on everyone’s mind, and lately that has come to include birth control [1]. A green contraceptive is something we should work toward but it won’t prevent the growing number of gender bending fish in our waterways.
Synthetic estrogen used in oral contraceptives contributes only 1% to the total amount of estrogens excreted by humans [2]. Additionally, almost half of this synthetic estrogen is filtered out during our wastewater treatment processes. Of all the estrogen sent into our water supply through human biology, only a very minute fraction is synthetic. Clearly, there are other sources contributing to gender confusion in fish [3].
If we really care about our environment and our water supply, I’d like to suggest an alternative culprit: hamburgers. It turns out cows, chickens and pigs contribute an estimated 90% of estrogens to the environment. Yes, 90%. So if we really want to green our water supply, we need to start by greening our dinner. How? Well, first we’d stop pumping our livestock full of hormones or, at the very least, we would treat agriculture manure. Studies have shown that hormones from animal manure reach both surface and ground water and that livestock pumped full of hormones increase their excretion of these hormones up to six fold.[1]
If we are going to be concerned about synthetic human estrogen in our water, we also need to pay attention to other likely culprits, and both industrial and agricultural sources need to be considered.
I find it troubling that we have dramatized the contribution of estrogens in our environment to women on the pill. I’m not suggesting we should ignore the impact of estrogens in our environment. In fact, quite the opposite. Clearly, the types and sources of estrogens in the environment are diverse and cumulative. Natural estrogens (agriculture and natural human excretion) as well as synthetic estrogens and estrogen-mimicking compounds (other pharmaceutical uses, industrial chemicals, pesticides, plastics, etc) are present in our waterways and cannot be discounted as sources of the observed phenomena in fish, even at trace levels. What I am suggesting is that we stop the knee-jerk response that reducing estrogens is as simple as reducing women’s use of birth control pills. It is estimated that unregulated agricultural run off annually contributes 13 tons of hormones to our water sources. Clearly, we need to broaden the conversation.
What else can we do? First, we need to reform our chemical policy in the United States so that harmful estrogen-mimicking compounds found in our everyday products stay off the shelves. The burden cannot and should not be on individuals and communities to protect the health of their families. Instead, we need reform that requires pre-market safety testing of all our consumer goods and personal care products. Second, as the 50th anniversary of the pill is on the horizon, I’d like to ask my friends and allies to take some time to appreciate and even celebrate contraception. Modern contraception enables women to choose the number and timing of their children, which is central to our health and economic well-being. And, where all women have access to affordable contraception, birthrates decline and population growth slows. Slower population growth is not a panacea for today’s environmental problems, but it can ease pressure on natural systems that are reeling from stress. So, contraception is good for women—and for the planet.
In the meantime, we might think about forgoing that next hormone-riddled bacon cheeseburger.
References: Callantine MR, et al. “Fecal elimination of estrogens by cattle treated with diethylstilbestrol and hexestrol.” Am J Vet Res. (1961) 22:462-465.
Jennifer Rogers is the Programs and Policy Director for the Reproductive Health Technologies Project (http://www.rhtp.org) where she is responsible for developing and leading key reproductive health projects and advocacy initiatives for the organization. Prior to joining RHTP, Jenn was the Director of Programs at the American College of Preventive Medicine, where she developed and oversaw ACPM’s adolescent and environmental health initiatives. She received her Masters in Public Health with a concentration in Maternal and Child Health from Boston University where she also served as a reproductive health advocate for the Massachusetts Emergency Contraception Network.
Categories
Fertility and the Environment •
Reproductive Health
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Minimal Stimulation
July 28, 2009 - Tuesday
Posted by admin
By: Dr. Fred Licciardi
I have been practicing infertility at NYU for 16 years. Basic infertility, reproductive surgery, ovulation induction, IVF, and egg donation are all areas of my expertise. Most of my patients are from New York , but people come to see me from other states and other countries.
Reprinted From Monday, January 21, 2008
Does taking a lower dose of fertility drugs improve your chances of becoming pregnant with IVF? I think not, but I can tell you of some exceptions. Mostly I have had some very good experiences with patients confirming that lower is not better.
How do I know?
Well, as it turns out over the past few years I have been seeing more patients from Europe. There are a few things that have contributed to this. One is the blog. It’s been fun getting e-mails and seeing patients from around the world. The second is the exchange rate: for some, New York is now a “reproductive tourism” destination. The third has to do with laws in Italy, Germany and other countries that restrict IVF and donor egg.
Anyway, the European doctors give their patients a much lower dose of drug that we do in the US. Part of this is due to the fact that they may not be allowed to fertilize more than a few eggs, so they don’t bother trying to get more. Another reason may just be due to a general philosophy that less drug is better.
So the typical European woman that sees me has done IVF many times, usually making just a few eggs on a lower dose of drug. Unless she has had a fantastic response, I increase the dose for her IVF cycle with me. In most cases, the egg yield is much higher (still in a safe range) and the pregnancy rate in these women is very high. So the point is that in these women, a higher dose is better because it increases the number of eggs, and therefore there are more embryos available for selection.
Do some women make more eggs with a lower dose? I have seen a few cases of this. This is typically the woman who was given a lower dose for IUI and develops more follicles than she did with her higher dose IVF cycle. Should we go back to the lower dose for the next IVF cycle? It’s a gamble and it takes a little courage. It is really hard emotionally to go into an “experimental” IVF cycle.
Many patients considering this have had many attempts and may not be ready to give up a couple months for a “let’s see” cycle. If you and your doctor can stomach it, you can give it a try. I can tell you I have one woman, who had been through many cycles, who wanted to give it a go, and she did better with less. Was that her month to make more, regardless of drug dose? Who knows, but let’s give her the credit.
But I do think starting on a minimal dose, just because your doctor thinks it’s more homeopathic and will result in better quality embryos, is not correct. To return to our common theme, if one of the self proclaimed experts in minimal stimulation wants to take 100 women and give them minimal stimulation, and take another 100 and give them regular stimulation, and then show us that minimal is better, great. But until this happens we have to say that it’s not better, and may be worse for most people. I know some of you can tell me that you did minimal and got pregnant. I just feel that my experience has shown that overall, regular may be better.
Categories
Donor Egg •
Egg Donation •
Fertility •
Fertility Drugs •
IUI •
IVF •
Pregnancy
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Looka! Looka!
July 27, 2009 - Monday
Posted by admin
Tonight I am going to Coney Island with my kids to see the fireworks. We will ride the Cyclone first (at least they will, you can’t get me on a roller coaster to save my life) and then Nathan’s, and after that we’ll hang out on the board walk until the display starts a little after sundown. I love Coney Island, I’ve been going there since I was a kid. My dad used to take me to the chick hatchery and put me smack in the middle of the fluffy little yellow things until I had my fill of patting their soft downy coats. I used to love that, and I cried bitter tears when it closed.
But there was a place my dad didn’t take me, a place I didn’t even know existed until this week, my friend Barbara saw a TV show on PBS about it.
Ironically, had my own kids been born in 1945 instead of 1995, I would have known about this place all too well.
The most popular attraction at the Coney Island Freak Show, next to the midgets, bearded ladies, and other assorted poor souls that we as a society could not find in our hearts to accept in those days, were the incubators.
For human infants, born too soon.
Like mine. Connor and Caitlin were born on the first day of my third trimester. I never made it to a LaMaze class and didn’t have time to paint the nursery. My babies were 2 lbs. 3 oz (Caitlin) and 2 lbs. 6 (Connor) and lived in state of the art incubators for over two months. The incubators that helped to save my babies lives cost $4,000 a day each and were not covered by my health insurance. (Did I mention that I’m divorced?)
But from 1903- 1945 there was only one place premature babies could be cared for and that was in a side show, not in a hospital. Doctors from around the country rushed premature infants to Coney Island for treatment. There was no other option available for these most fragile of souls.
File this under Where There’s A Will, There’s A Way. He was a visionary, he was a failure. He was a showman, he was a man of medicine. He was a savior, he was a public joke. Sometimes revered, sometimes ridiculed, but he didn’t stop. Dr. Martin Couney was determined to save premature babies, when the world assumed they did not have a chance, when infant mortality rates were so high that these tiniest of the tiny were not even an afterthought. Even, unbelievably so, for their parents, who often abandoned them at birth. Dr. Couney continued to experiment and refine the incubator system in the only place he could, among the barkers and cotton candy sellers. 6,500 out of 8,000 babies lived, because of The Incubator Baby Exhibit in Luna Park. The development and application of an important, ground breaking technology was paid for with each sticky handed admission, ten cents at a time. There was no other way for him to fund his work.
Eventually hospitals caught up to Coney Island, with Cornell being the first, and of course the rest of the world followed.
So tonight when I’m oohing and aahing at the fireworks I’ll be hearing the barkers yelling “Looka Looka! See the Babies no Bigger than Chickens!” and remembering a time when my own babies looked like a two pack of Cornish hens. I’ll say a silent thank you to Dr. Couney, and remember to never give up.
Corey Whelan
Program Director
Please visit these links for more information:
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/1994/2/1994_2_24.shtml
http://www.neonatology.org/pdf/NYT_BeardedLady.pdf
http://www.coneyislandhistory.org/collection/index.php?g=detail&object_id=602
Categories
Family Building
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