Ovulation Treatments and Breast Tumors

When women are pregnant, or breast feeding, or taking birth control pills, they are not ovulating, and they are therefore at reduced risk of ovarian cancer. This is further true if you have breastfed more than one baby, and if you have had children when you were younger, rather than older. When women are given ovulation inducing medications they may be slightly increasing their risk. Patients worried about starting infertility treatments often express this concern to me. Studies have varied in their interpretation of breast and ovarian cancer risk for the infertility patient. Most women don't ovulate too many 'extra' times with just a few short months of infertility ovulation treatment, so ovarian cancer not regarded as an actual consequence of fertility enhancing ovulation treatment, and that is what we routinely tell our patients. In fact if a woman has an ovarian cyst, we don't normally stop infertility treatments. But as we still see breast cancer as the most common cancer in women we are wondering more about breast cancer risk from infertility treatments. But up until now we have paid less attention to what the breast tissue response of ovulation treatments have been. One of the most common kinds of breast lump is a fibroadenoma. Not only are fibroadenomas of the breast not thought to be cancerous, but they are not thought to be able to turn cancerous. A single case has now been reported in Fertility and Sterility of a fibroadenoma breast lump turning into a cancerous tumor during fertility treatment. Fertility treatments increase estrogen blood levels and this is theorized to be the way a noncancerous breast lump could turn cancerous when stimulated with enough estrogen. Currently there are no specific recommendations for fertility patients who have non-cancerous breast lumps to be treated any differently than your gyno would normally. Maybe you need to stop smoking, pay attention to your diet, limit long term hormone treatments after menopause, increase your exercise or limit your alcohol intake; but maybe you should first get any breast lumps treated appropriately. But this case calls attention to an important development in breast care that we will have to follow. Your gyno can calculate your risk of breast cancer by formulas available. Options for following your breast cancer risk would include extra clinical breast exams with your gyno or the Halo Breast Pap Test. Although we do not uniformly encourage women to do self breast exams, it may be that an infertility patient undergoing ovulation treatments should be more attentive to them.

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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