GynoFiles

General exercise advice is to build as much muscle as you can to make your metabolism rise, and to make you more fit. Being that the thigh muscle is one of our largest (the gluteus muscle of the buttock, and the lats are actually larger), building your thigh muscle strength will give you a lot of return for your workout!. In a recent study from Austria reported in Reuters Health) they showed that if your thigh  are weak you are more likely to develop knee osteoarthritis. so it is very important to your future mobility as well as your future ability to maneuver a soccer ball, lunge for a backhand, or push off the wall in swimming! Study author Dr. Adam Culvenor, a researcher at Paracelsus Medical University in Salzburg, Austria was quoted about the publication in Arthritis Care and Research, February 8 to say "While our recent study has highlighted the important role of strong thigh muscles in reducing the risk of knee osteoarthritis development, particularly in women, it i...

What do you reach for when flying out of bed to workout? Favorite shirt? Leggings? Have you considered support stockings. It's especially smart to wear support stockings during long plane rides, long immobile days at work, and if you have to stand hours on hard concrete, but you can also wear them during work outs as and extra measure to prevent blood clots. Women flying always should wear some compression stockings, especially the compression on the ankles from these stockings helps not only reduce risk of blood clots, but it reduces the risk of ankle swelling. Wearing support hose is one strategy with virtually no side effects! The risk of developing a blood clot that is serious is about 1-5 per 10,000 women; it rises to 3-12/10,000 if you are on a combination hormonal contraceptive, and the risk is between 5-20/10,000 women during pregnancy and that risk remains higher than normal in the post partum period of time. The vaginal ring as a contraceptive would approximately double ...

A recent article about the ways to make your workouts 'easie r' focused on some excellent health tips like better sleep, a few nutrition tips, and some tips about warm up. Here are a few focused tips specifically for women who have menstrual periods, beyond making sure you hydrate especially well, make sure you are consistent with your Kegal's exercises, and don't skip exercising when you are on your menstrual period. Exercise has long been shown to be a helpful preventative of dysmenorrhea or menstrual cramping. and the way the menstrual cycle hormones are, apparently strength building is extra good during the menstrual cycle , relative to training on non-period days! Although aerobic exercise is critically important as part of any lifestyle, even stretching exercises have been shown to reduce menstrual cramps . We also think that estrogen protects the heart, and in fact there are healthier heart rate patterns around ovulation, and not much overall heart rate effect...

Menopause and/or aging itself do, to some extent, cause the bladder, uterus and rectum to drop. This is due, in part, to the lack of estrogen, which causes a thinning and weakening of all the pelvic muscles. Other factors are more significant, and bladder problems often begin with pregnancy and childbirth. We can blame some these problems on our ancient history. The first hominid species to walk upright evolved more than 2 million years ago. The most important branch of hominids was Australopithecus . These primitive humans walked semi-upright and gave birth to small-brained offspring. Thus, the female pelvis required only slight adaptations for the increased stress of childbearing. These early hominids evolved into Homo erectus about 1 million years ago and then emerged as Homo sapiens just over 300,000 years ago. This new species had a “modern” pelvis—an awkward compromise that permitted erect and stable locomotion on two feet while allowing the birth of a (relatively) large...

  Breast cancer prevention has been widely promoted for many years, yet too few women are taking advantage of this. Breast cancer occurs in 1/8 women, and about 1% of women with prior breast cancer are diagnosed with a breast cancer in the opposite breast each year. Mostly breast cancer prevention strategies look at risk factors such as smoking and alcohol, and asking women to avoid these things.There has never been a safe level of alcohol established with respect to breast cancer.  But knowing that in reality getting breast cancer is a combination of genetics, exposure, diet, childbearing factors, and hormones that ultimately causes breast cancer. Delaying when you have children, not breastfeeding, being obese after menopause, and excessively drinking alcohol all increases your breast cancer risk. It may not be blood levels of estrogen, progesterone or testosterone, but the local levels of estrogen in the breast tissue itself. Regardless of whether its the blood le...

It's tough to know how exercise is going to translate into health for all your body parts, and ultimately end up with the right amount of fitness, the ideal weight range, and your healthiest body shaping while maintaining healthy bones, joints, breasts and waist. Both shape and fitness goals are often in concert, but some fine tuning may be necessary. If you suffer injury, or are slow to recover, you need additional adjustment to fitness. Your physician's exercise goals may be quite extensive, whether you have discussed or not! Fitness program goals for you includes: to maintain enough exercise to be vigorous, have better cardiovascular health, to lessen risks of strokes and blood clots, to think better, to sleep, to have better sex, to feel better, keep your weight in the healthiest range it can be, prevent obesity, and finally perhaps to look better! While all those benefits can be obtained, for long term sustaining of those benefits you have to look at exactly the relations...

There are many strategies to reduce breast cancer risk, and weight loss and exercise are our front line strategy. And as a side not new studies show that even with the more serious estrogen receptor and progesterone receptor cancers exercise and weight loss will prolong survival! Too few women however realize that there are medical ways of improving breast cancer survival. F use medication to lower your breast cancer risk . The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) has changed the tenor of its recommendations in its clinical practice guideline on the use of chemoprevention for breast cancer, and they now are including the medications of raloxifene, and exemestane in the medications not just tamoxifen, and the organization is wanting more people to seriously consider these medication. Their point is that they are not seeing more people use these very effective therapies, and so awareness is not increasing, and more women and their gynos need to take note. Here is what y...

You are collecting a lot of data out there. Even if you've never accessed it, your phone may know how many steps you have accumulated today. Others are using devices such as Fitbits, home blood pressure monitors, and even blood sugar monitors to the max and collecting all sorts of data. But how that data is compiled, and how it's analyzed in the big picture of your The question has been posed as to what data to give your gyno about your daily exercise, and it's hitting the health news. As your gyno I would say, track fitness data with some data for us on women’s health: your cycles, your sex drive, your sleep, the number of Kegel's you do, of course through pregnancy and after surgery. 

Your mind and your body are connected. For a number of years we have discussed that Alzheimer's patients can prevent disease and improve prognosis though exercise , now some of this research has been applied to the healthy as well. In a simple study of memory, Lisa Weinberg, a psychology graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology showed that brief resistance exercise done immediately after a visual learning task enhances episodic memory by about 10%. Aerobics are good for the heart and overall longevity and disease prevention, but for brain boost and even some stress reduction, pumping some iron, or getting resistance thorough machine use will actually be the ticket to better thinking. Medscape reports that the study was published in the October issue of Acta Psychologica. The study was supported in part by a grant from the Clinical and Translational Science Awards program, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Center for Research Resource. The...

Not strictly a gyno topic, but a topic such as brain function as we get older, and brain function improvement are some of the most important and common questions I get asked as a physician, so it is a topic I do like to think and write about. As a normal consequence of aging we get changes in memory and thinking. It's not all just decline of thinking function, there may be some truth to making room for new facts and new ways of thinking and just literally spring cleaning out the old ideas. For a few of us a bit of word searching and forgetfulness will eventually translate into full blown dementia. If you want to see if your memory is declining take this quiz from AARP . And we want to prevent it. We should no longer think of Alzheimer’ s as an older person’s disease, but the ultimate result of brain changes that occur one to two decades before the signs of clinical symptoms. For some facts and figures on the topic of Alzheimer's go to NIH . Alzheimer's Disease w...