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Women's Newsletter
July 28, 2008


In This Issue
• Suckling Infant Triggers 'Trust' Hormone in Moms
• Melanoma Rates Soar Among Younger Women
• Breast-Conserving Surgery Leaves Many Cancer Patients Disappointed
• More 90-Plus Women Than Men Prone to Dementia
 

Suckling Infant Triggers 'Trust' Hormone in Moms


FRIDAY, July 18 (HealthDay News) -- How do infants and mothers bond, biologically speaking?

Researchers have discovered that babies nursing at their mother's breast set off a cascade of events leading to release of oxytocin, known as the "trust" hormone in their mother's brains.

Recent research has found oxytocin to be involved in trust and love in both humans and animals. It is also causes the release of milk from the mammary gland.

Researchers from the University of Warwick, in collaboration with other universities and institutes in Edinburgh, France and Italy, now seem to have pinpointed the actual mechanism by which suckling triggers the release of oxytocin.

Neurons start releasing oxytocin from their dendrites (the arms that extend outward from the nerve cell that transport messages to and from other nerve cells) and from their nerve endings when a baby suckles.

Dendrites had been thought to receive more than transmit information, but now it appears that the release of oxytocin from the dendrites increases intra-neuron communication. That leads to more oxytocin being produced, which facilitates the process of mother-child bonding.

"We knew that these pulses arise because, during suckling, oxytocin neurons fire together in dramatic synchronized bursts. But exactly how these bursts arise has been a major problem that has until now eluded explanation. This research has allowed us to incorporate all the latest research in a large computational model of the whole population of oxytocin cells," study co-author Jianfeng Feng, a computational biology researcher at the University of Warwick, said in a university news release.

"In this model, we have shown that the dendritic interactions are enhanced enough to trigger a massive positive-feedback on activity," he continued. "The model gives us a possible explanation of an important event in the brain that could be used to study and explain many other similar brain activities."

The findings are published in the July 18 issue of PLoS Computational Biology.

More information

Visit womenshealth.gov for more on breast-feeding.


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Melanoma Rates Soar Among Younger Women


THURSDAY, July 10 (HealthDay News) -- Cases of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, are increasing sharply among younger women in the United States, but not among younger men, a new study says.

"These findings are important, because they suggest that public education campaigns to educate Americans about the risks of skin cancer from sun tanning do not appear to have resulted in a reduction in melanoma rates among young women," said lead researcher Mark Purdue, of the National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Epidemiology & Genetics.

"We observed a 50 percent increase in the annual incidence of melanoma among young adult Caucasian women between 1980 and 2004," he added.

The number of cases among young women increased from 9.4 per 100,000 in 1980 to 13.9 per 100,000 in 2004, according to the report, published in the July 10 online edition of the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.

For the study, Purdue's team collected data on the incidence of melanoma among white men and women, 15 to 39 years of age. The researchers used data from the cancer institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results Program, which is a network of regional cancer registries that record all newly diagnosed cancers.

In addition to the rising rates of melanoma among younger women, the researchers found an increasing trend for thicker and later-stage melanomas, which suggests that the increase isn't the result of better reporting of the disease.

Purdue said it's not clear what's driving the melanoma trend among younger women.

"The leveling off in melanoma rates for young men gives cause for optimism regarding a possible reduction in future trends in older men," Purdue said. "However, our findings for young women suggest that we may see increasing rates of melanoma among older women for some time to come."

Dr. Jeffrey C. Salomon, an assistant clinical professor of plastic surgery at Yale University School of Medicine, said the findings reflect what doctors are seeing in their offices.

"Young people should consider these statistics as a warning that they, too, are susceptible to this potentially dangerous form of skin cancer," Salomon said. And, he added, "The data is similar to the findings of large-scale studies in Australia."

People -- whether young or not -- should take precautions and limit their sun and ultraviolet radiation exposure and incorporate the use of sunscreens containing UVA blocks, Salomon advised.

And people should routinely examine themselves for telltale signs of melanoma, such as suspicious pigmented lesions, Salomon said. "I regularly have patients who have had pigmented lesions noted by themselves or other people that turned out to be a melanoma. Checking yourself and others can save someone's life," he said.

More information

To learn more about melanoma, visit the American Cancer Society  External Links Disclaimer Logo.

Steps to Protect Yourself From the Sun

Dr. Robin Ashinoff, medical director of Dermatologic, Mohs, and Laser Surgery at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, offers the following advice to help prevent melanoma:

  • Don't deliberately sunbathe. There's no such thing as a "safe" tan -- not even from tanning beds.
  • Slip, slop, slap -- slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen, slap on a hat.
  • Use a sunscreen with SPF 30 or higher.
  • If you have to be tan, for whatever psychological reasons, get a spray tan or put on a self tanner.

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Breast-Conserving Surgery Leaves Many Cancer Patients Disappointed


WEDNESDAY, July 9 (HealthDay News) -- A third of women who opt for breast-conserving cancer surgery say they now have an asymmetry between their breasts that greatly affects their quality of life, a new study says.

Women whose affected breast looked noticeably different after surgery were twice as likely to fear their cancer returning and to have symptoms of depression when compared with women whose breasts still appeared similar, according to the study by researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Their findings are published in the July 10 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

"We found that one of the most important factors of postoperative quality of life and satisfaction was postoperative asymmetry or the aesthetic outcome that women experienced after their surgery," study author Dr. Jennifer Waljee, a resident in general surgery at the U-M Medical School, said in a university news release.

Many women diagnosed with breast cancer can choose between surgery that removes just the tumor and some surrounding tissue or a mastectomy, which removes the entire breast. Reconstructive surgery is possible after each type of operation.

"It's important for women to think about all of those issues at the time that they're making their surgical decision and realize that although breast-conserving surgery may or may not be less disfiguring than mastectomy, they're likely to experience some asymmetry afterwards that may impact their quality of life," Waljee said.

Surgeons usually discuss prior to the operation the types of aesthetic changes mastectomy patients will see after. The researchers believe the same level of counseling is not given those having breast-conserving surgery, leaving them with incorrect expectations of what their breast will look like after the operation.

"It's important for breast surgeons to have an open and honest dialog with their patients so that they understand patients' expectations before surgery and can better address postoperative recovery needs," Waljee said.

More information

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation has more about breast cancer  External Links Disclaimer Logo.


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More 90-Plus Women Than Men Prone to Dementia


WEDNESDAY, July 2 (HealthDay News) -- Not as many men as women make it to their 90s or beyond, but those who do have an advantage over their female counterparts: Researchers found that males aged 90 and older are more likely to avoid dementia than women of similar age.

There's no clear reason for the striking discrepancy, according to the study, which found signs of senility in a full 45 percent of women aged 90 and older from a southern California retirement community. Men weren't immune to mental decline, however, since 28 percent of them also suffered from dementia.

Still, "given the increasing number of people (aged 90 and older) this can become a fairly big public health problem," said study lead author Maria Corrada, an assistant adjunct professor of neurology at the University of California, Irvine. "We need to be prepared for that. Dementia requires a lot of care, and a lot of money needs to be spent on caring for these people."

Dementia -- also known as senility -- refers to the mental confusion that can strike the elderly. Alzheimer's disease, stroke and brain injuries can lead to the condition, although the cause is sometimes unknown.

Researchers know little about how senility affects the so-called "oldest old" -- people 90 and older. There are now an estimated two million American in this age group and that number is projected to grow substantially as the population ages.

In the new study, the researchers examined a survey of 911 men and women over the age of 90 between 2003 and 2006. In the 1980s, all the participants had lived in the Leisure Village retirement community in Orange County, Calif., and took part in another study at that time.

Two-thirds of the participants were women and most were white, upper-middle class and well-educated. In some cases, the researchers interviewed them by phone or in person; in others, researchers talked to someone else, such as a relative or caregiver.

The study findings were published online July 2 in the journal Neurology.

Why the discrepancy between the genders in terms of dementia risk? Although the study didn't look at when the participants started showing signs of senility, it's possible that women may simply live longer with the condition than men, Corrada said. Women, after all, live longer than men in general.

It's also possible that men who manage to reach the age of 90 have "the best protoplasm," said William Thies, vice president for medical and scientific affairs with the Alzheimer's Association. In other words, men have to be in pretty good shape to make it that far.

Corrada and her colleagues also found that women with higher levels of education were less likely to show signs of senility. More education didn't seem to have any effect in men, however.

"Education may mean something different for men and women in this age group," Corrada said.

Other research has linked education to brain health, Corrada added. "People who have more education and more intellectual attainment in their lives are less likely to become demented," she said. "That may be simply because they start out so much better than everyone else (brain-wise) that they can cope better" with aging.

More information

Learn more about dementia from the American Academy of Family Physicians  External Links Disclaimer Logo.


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