GynoFiles

We urge women with heavy menstrual bleeding to seek answers, get therapies and if interested, participate in a clinical research trial . Uterine fibroids, uterine polyps, and hormonal imbalance get so much talk on gyno blog, if we have a heavy menstrual period we assume it's one of those conditions. And it would be smart for your gyno to rule out that cause. But there are other, less common, and more hidden causes of bleeding. If you have had a normal pelvic exam, a normal endometrial biopsy, you seem to have hormones in balance considering you have regular periods, there may be other, actually medical conditions as the cause. Could it be a deficiency of Factor VIII needed for clotting? Von Willebrand factor which carries Factor VIII can be low. When this factor is low, it leads to Factor VIII to be low which can cause bleeding. It check for on a blood test about 1 percent of women will have this. Bleeding Bleeding Bleeding on your Period? Yes, VWF deficiency can be a ca...

In a huge national push from Washington University Dr. Colditz has emphasized that mammogram screening in not prevention and that the whole topic of prevention needs to be updated, even considering prevention strategies in childhood . To that end, looking at older patients, in whom there is still time for prevention, they have discovered the use of anti-hormone therapy for breast cancer at the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine at Queen Mary University in London the use of the antiestrogen anastrozole was shown make women be 53% less likely to get breast caner . Oddly the researchers in this international study of breast cancer prevention found that there was a 40% reduction in skin cancers for the women who took the treatment as well. The women have been studied for 5 years, and there is 15 years of follow up planned. The results of this breast cancer article were published in the Lancet . Not yet enough to make this medication used for this purpose, but it does open a d...

Since endometriosis is a long term chronic disease, we need therapies that can be given over many years and therapies that might even allow some women to be treated and then relieved of further symptoms. New treatments are needed. Endometriosis never appears prior to puberty, and resolves in most women with menopause. Thus it has always been assumed to primarily be a disease caused by the estrogen in the body. Since estrogen is primarily made from the ovary most treatments involve shutting down the ovary's ovulation and therefore the ovary's production of estrogen. But there are alternative ways of decreasing estrogen in the body, and decreasing it more efficiently than just treating the ovulation sequence. Medications that would do that target the body's chemical pathway to produce estrogen from whatever source including the adrenal gland and the body's fat. That is done with medications called aromatase inhibitors.  For women with the pain of endometriosis the newe...

Endometriosis and endometriosis syndrome are related to the female hormone estrogen. The more estrogen we have the syndrome gets worse. When women transition through menopause the disease endometriosis tends to resolve. So treatments have focused on the ability of a medicine to reduce the production of ovarian estrogen. But estrogen is produced in other prats of the body as well, such as the brain and in our fat. So the newest strategies for successful treatment of endometriosis involves reducing every source of estrogen. Inducing more effective hypoestrogenemia can be done with the compounds known as aromatase inhibitors. These medicines, including the breast cancer treatments of letrozole and anastrozole can reduce total body estrogen production very effectively and some small studies have shown that in fact this strategy can work for the treatment of endometriosis even when other treatments have failed. These treatments also offer hope for women who didn't get relief from a hys...