WEDNESDAY, Oct. 1 (HealthDay News) -- Women with a history of dieting or other practices that restrict their eating habits may be more vulnerable to gaining too much or too little weight during pregnancy, a new study finds.

University of North Carolina researchers, in a study of more than 1,200 women, found these previously restricted eaters tended to gain more than the recommended amount of weight if they were either normal, overweight or obese at the start of pregnancy. Restricted eaters who were underweight at the start of their pregnancy tended to gain less than the recommended amount.

The study, published in the October issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, based the desired weight gain amounts on recommendations made by the Institute of Medicine. The institute says women should gain 28 to 40 pounds if they are underweight, 25 to 35 pounds if normal weight, 15 to 25 pounds if overweight, and at least 15 pounds if obese.

"During pregnancy, it would be useful to target these women with similar nutritional and physical activity strategies in order to avoid excessive weight gain and adverse pregnancy outcomes such as Caesarean sections, Macrosomia, and large-for-gestational age [LGA], as well as shorter duration of breast-feeding and higher weight retention in the postpartum period," study co-author Anna Maria Siega-Riz said in a news release issued by the publisher.

More information

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has more about having a healthy pregnancy.

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 24 (HealthDay News) -- Young women diagnosed with a common form of early-stage breast cancer called ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) are no more likely to have recurrences than older women with the disease, a new study finds.

The presumption has been that women aged 40 and younger, when diagnosed with DCIS, were more likely to have it recur, noted Dr. Aruna Turaka, a fellow in the department of radiation oncology at Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia. But her new study -- which she is due to present Wednesday at the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology annual meeting in Boston -- found otherwise.

According to the U.S. National Cancer Institute, DCIS is a noninvasive condition in which abnormal cells are found in the lining of a breast duct; the abnormal cells have not spilled out from the duct to other breast tissues, however. About 62,000 cases of in situ cancer are diagnosed each year, according to the American Cancer Society.

In the new study, "We looked into our institutional database at Fox Chase from 1978 to 2007," Turaka explained. All of the DCIS patients were treated with breast-conserving surgery and radiation.

The researchers examined the records of 440 patients with DCIS; 24 were 40 or younger; the rest were aged 41 and older. The team then looked at follow-up records from 10 and 15 years after treatment.

"The overall recurrence over 10 years was 7 percent, and at 15 years, 8 percent," she said. Ranked by age, Turaka found that at the 15-year follow-up, 10 percent of women 40 and under had a cancer recurrence, while 7 percent of those aged 41-54 did, 11 percent of those aged 55-69 did, and 4 percent of those aged 70 and above did.

"It shows there is a trend toward increased recurrence in younger versus older, but it is not statistically significant," Turaka said.

Prior studies did find a higher risk of recurrence in younger women with DCIS, she said, but those studies also had some methodology problems, including using varying definitions for DCIS.

One expert applauded the new study.

"They have debunked the commonly held belief that age alone is a risk factor for recurrence after treatment of DCIS," said Dr. Ann Partridge, a medical oncologist and researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital, in Boston.

Partridge has published about women's anxiety over their prognosis when diagnosed with a DCIS. She found that women are typically highly anxious, even though their risk of recurrence or of developing invasive breast cancer is low.

"I think this is a good study," Partridge said, although it does have limitations. For instance, she said, it is a single-institution study. However, Fox Chase physicians "are doing what they should be doing," Partridge said, explaining that the institution is careful about selecting the right treatment for the right patients, based on the characteristics of their cancer.

More information

There's more on DCIS at breastcancer.org  .

THURSDAY, Sept. 18 (HealthDay News) -- The anti-cancer drug trabectedin shows promise in treating women with recurrent ovarian cancer, according to a study led by researchers at the University of California, Irvine.

The international Phase III study included 672 ovarian cancer patients whose disease had progressed after first-line treatment. Half the women received standard treatment with the chemotherapy drug pegylated liposomal doxorubicin, while the other half received the chemotherapy drug and trabectedin.

Women who received the combination therapy had no cancer progression for an average of 7.3 months, compared to 5.8 months for those who received the chemotherapy drug alone.

Among women who'd had ovarian cancer relapse more than six months after the first-line therapy, the median progression-free time was 9.2 months for those who received the combination treatment and 7.5 months for those who received the chemotherapy drug alone.

The findings were presented Sept. 15 at the 33rd Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology, in Stockholm, Sweden.

"These are exciting results, because positive trials in recurrent ovarian cancer are rare and have almost always led to federally approved treatments," study leader Dr. Bradley Monk, a UC Irvine gynecologic oncologist, said in a university news release.

"This treatment undoubtedly will be evaluated carefully by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and, if approved, will give women with ovarian cancer another much needed option," said Monk, an associate professor who studies and treats ovarian cancer at UC Irvine's Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Trabectedin (brand name Yondelis) is used in Europe and South Korea to treat advanced soft tissue sarcoma. It's also being tested for treatment of prostate, breast and pediatric cancers.

The drug is a synthetic version of a compound isolated from the sea squirt, a tubular marine creature used in numerous medical studies. The drug binds to the DNA of cancer cells and blocks their ability to multiply, according to information in the UC Irvine news release.

Each year in the United States, about 20,000 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and about 15,000 die of the disease. When the disease is detected early (confined to the ovaries), about 90 percent of patients live at least five years. But when ovarian cancer is detected after it's spread, only about 30 percent of patients survive five years.

More information

The American Cancer Society has more about ovarian cancer  .

WEDNESDAY, July 30 (HealthDay News) -- Researchers have uncovered a potential cause for postpartum depression, at least in mice.

According to the study, from assistant researcher Jamie Maguire and lead researcher Istvan Mody, both of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, dysregulation of a particular class of proteins called GABA receptors on the surface of certain neurons in the brain may induce post-delivery mood disorders ranging from "baby blues" to postpartum psychosis.

The findings immediately suggest a possible therapeutic intervention, the authors noted. They also provided researchers with a new animal model for studying the biology and treatment of the disease -- a valuable research tool that could accelerate the development of new treatments.

Yet the work was not performed in humans, stressed Dr. Bernard Carroll, scientific director of the Pacific Behavioral Research Foundation in California. Just because these animals appear to suffer from a disease akin to postpartum depression, he said, does not mean the two conditions are identical.

"We have to remember that the model is not the disease," he said.

The results were published in the July 31 issue of Neuron.

The protein at the heart of this study, the GABA receptor (type A), serves an inhibitory role in the nervous system, dampening the effect of excitatory neurotransmitters in response to its substrate, GABA. These receptors can bind to more than one molecule, however, and one particular class of molecules called neurosteroids can modulate the receptors' activity.

Neurosteroids are produced in the central nervous system from steroid hormones such as progesterone. During pregnancy, the levels of reproductive hormones (including progesterone) rise sharply, only to drop to pre-pregnancy levels shortly after delivery. As a result, neurosteroid levels also rise and fall.

Maguire and Mody wanted to see what happens to GABA receptors in the brains of mice undergoing the hormonal swings associated with pregnancy. By comparing virgin, pregnant and postpartum mice, the pair discovered that GABA receptor abundance (and function) falls during pregnancy and then returns to pre-pregnancy levels following birth.

That makes sense from a homeostatic point of view, Maguire explained. For the body to maintain a constant level of GABA receptor-derived inhibition, receptor abundance must stay more or less in synch with neurosteroid levels.

"If you want to maintain a constant level of inhibition, with more neurosteroids, you need fewer receptors," she explained. "After pregnancy, when hormone levels drop off, you need more receptors to maintain that level. If you cannot maintain that level after pregnancy, that's when the disorders manifest."

She and Mody reached that conclusion using mice genetically engineered to lack a particular component of the GABA receptor -- that is, mice that cannot adjust GABA receptor levels in response to changing hormone levels. By comparing these mutants to normal mice, the pair discovered that dysregulation of the normal changes in GABA receptor levels lead to mouse behaviors akin to postpartum depression, such as anxiety and depression, with a concomitant decrease in pup survival.

Treatment with THIP (Gaboxadol), a GABA receptor agonist originally intended to treat sleep disorders, ameliorated these effects in mice containing decreased levels of GABA receptors.

"Our thinking is that postpartum depression, and maybe premenstrual syndrome and premenstrual dysphoric disorder, may be due to impaired trafficking of these [GABA] receptors to the [neural] membrane," Mody said.

The next step, he said, is to determine whether human postpartum depression is caused by a similar defect.

"We don't know if this is the same mechanism in humans, but I think all indications are there," Mody said. "The women that are affected by the disorder, the hormone levels are not changed, they are not different than in unaffected women. So, we are confident that it must be the receptor trafficking mechanism that is affected, because the changes in hormone levels are pretty normal."

Dr. Julio Licinio, chairman of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, praised the research as "very interesting," particularly its development of a new animal model of postpartum depression, which can aid both research and drug development.

"This is probably the strongest [animal] model I have seen in a long time," he said.

More information

For more on postpartum depression, visit womenshealth.gov.