GynoFiles

When fertility treatments fail patients and their gynos look for what new strategies can help their female patients and their partners to conceive. In the broad sense we explain fertility to our patients fairly simply: we have to ovulate, the egg has to meet up with the sperm, it has to implant. And the ovulation treatments aim to make this happen, and literally dozens of medications and perhaps hundreds of dosing and timing strategies have been tried. We say that these three 'simple' steps is all it takes, but of course there are many delicate steps in the ovulation process, and some women will just not respond to the treatments we give. Overall good nutrition is very important, and we now know that for men over the age of 35, as their sperm counts are dropping, the micronutrients of vitamins C and E as well as zinc will help them have less DNA damage to their sperm. One newer treatment that is fairly controversial for women is the use of Growth Hormone (GH) to improve ovu...

We have healthy bones because there is a balance between the bone we form and the bone we resorb thoughout one's life. After the rapid bone gain as infants we gain steadily as children, and then have a spurt in bone mass through our growth spurt a puberty when we put down more bone than we resorb to utilize calcium, and we lose the ability to put calcium back into the bones to keep them as thick as they were in youth. The process of bone development is a process whereby the growth plates are left open so that bones can gain in strength, volume, and length. thus x-rays looking at girls in puberty, their bone age and their hormones can help determine where they are in the process and roughly how tall they will be. Other hormones besides estrogen affect this process. The hormones made as a girl crosses into puberty from the adrenal gland is actually the process of adrenarche, and the maturation of our growth hormone production is called somatarche (which is also the maturing of the...