Are You the One in Ten?

10% of Women of Reproductive age Get Pregnant Each Year, so a few things to think about

About two thirds of pregnant women are prescribed medications during pregnancy that are not their vitamins. And yet when you take those medications you may in fact already be pregnant, so gynos warn, if you are between the ages of 15 and 45, think about what you take and how that medicine would sit with a pregnancy. If you want to know what you are taking is safe for a developing pregnancy, read the label, but it's probably confusing. And the language it's written in and the research it's based on may be as confusing to your gyno as to you! And when you ask your gyno medication safety questions, the most important question to start with: what is your background risk of having a complication? About 2-3% of women have birth defects regardless of whether they have medical complications to their pregnancy, but if you have medical conditions in pregnancy which always get treated with medication, for you and your gyno to properly evaluate the safety, you have to then be sure that the birth defects seen are medication related, and not just chance or the medical problem itself. Nausea and Vomiting of pregnancy currently is reported in about 85% of all women who are pregnant.Nausea and vomiting in pregnancy is more common in first pregnancies and it is most likely to be resolving by the third month. There's always been a popular wives belief that a "sick pregnancy" leads to an easy confinement. Since the nausea and vomiting more likely occur in the morning we have always called pregnancy nausea "morning sickness." We have long struggled with whether the medicines we use to treat nausea and vomiting in pregnancy, whether it causes an easier birth or not, but are the medicines used to treat this actually safe. We once had a drug in the US called Bendectin, and in 1983 it was removed from the us market for presumed safety questions with regards to birth defects. It was the combination of doxylamine and Vitamin B6. That very combination is still sold in Canada.without any undue reports of abnormalities. In the USA we have a sleep medicine called Unisom, and it's actually doxylamine, so we can cobble together the old combination to use if we want to. And it's a good one. But we've switched to using ondansetron. The use of this medicine grew rapidly because it was so effective, long before any safety studies were published. Then the safety studies were "look back" or what is called retrospective studies and they were often big! As many as 5000 women, and the good news was that the look back studies showed that there were no reasons for the physicians to feel that this drug was not safe. There are lots of ways to track the safety of the medications that you are taking when you are pregnant. It's important to know if there are new alerts or new studies, so keep vigilant in watching the news and talking with your health care provider. Your physician might be using PubMed or the Web of Science to find answers to questions regarding exposures and risks.
Resources you can follow would include:
http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/
http://www.reprotox.org/Default.aspx
http://embase.com/

Passing Your Uterine Lining, Menstrual Period Norms

Decidual Cast Periods can be fairly easy, passing some tissue at a time, or off can come the whole lining in one piece called a decidual cast. Generally the lining of the uterus is only 6-8 mm thick at the time of the menstrual period, and it is shed gradually, a few cells at a time. The decidual cast is when the entire lining passes spontaneously. It's not uncommon, but it usually both uncomfortable, and alarming to some. But us women are designed to have some sort of periods Or Not? We have to pass tissue each month. Or Not? Are they good for us? Or Not? Do we want them? Or Not? Is this something that is individual? Or Not? It's a complex topic that I will be discussing a lot over my time in this blog. So lets start with basics: How much do we bleed and what are we loosing, and just what was this that the patient passed? And another basic: track your periods, and the Women's Health Practice site http://www.womenshealthpractice.com/media/pdf/menstrual_chart.pdf you...

You Have an IUD: But a Positive Pregnancy Test

Fortunately IUD pregnancy failures are rare. But if you have an IUD for contraception, and you get a positive pregnancy test, you probably ask yourself, what next? Well, make your gyno appointment promptly, this is a condition that is not typically an emergency, but it can be and it’s not handled over the phone or on a blog, or through self diagnosis! That being said, some researchers from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas decided to look back at over 4100 women who had IUDs and of those 42 cases who became pregnant in their institution, over about a year period of time, to help understand what these women could expect when they got to their gyno and what actually happened to their pregnancies. Accurate pregnancy diagnosis, pelvic examination, and pelvic ultrasound were the cornerstones of the evaluations. They had very specific ways they looked at their ultrasound to prove there was no pregnancy in the fallopian tube, or partially in the fallopian tube...

Post-Endometrial Ablation Syndrome

If you have had an endometrial ablation and have developed symptoms of pelvic pain you might have post endometrial ablation syndrome. What is post-endometrial ablation syndrome? It is a constellation of symptoms due to entrapped blood or tissue within a uterus that has previously undergone an endometrial ablation. We are able to diagnose this at Women's Health Practic e but occasionally other conditions are causing similar symptoms. Other complications of endometrial ablation include pregnancy, risks from pre-existing conditions such as a polyp or fibroid, an infection of the uterus, or a pregnancy. If you have had a tubal ligation then it is possible that the condition could be post-ablation tubal sterilization syndrome. The ablation procedure is designed to destroy all lining tissue, but in fact there is no way to confirm the completeness of the ablation. It is thought that either residual or regrowth of the tissue is producing the symptoms of post-endometrial ablation syndrom...

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