GynoFiles

When you go to the gyno to get tested...for anything....the test may be a positive test or a negative test, and actually the test might be inconclusive, but lets not deal with those today. Mathematics enters the scene from the beginning, and then again after you get your results. Most of us think the math of any one test is "the percent chance that my test, if I get it, will be normal" or the "percent chance that it will be abnormal" and, yes, that is the way math first enters your discussion. Depending on that math, you may or may not want to take the test, or you may o may not want to spend your money on the test. But it gets more mathematically complex from here. What you want to know, is if you had a positive test what was the percent chance this positive was correct...and what is the chance that it was not correct? And so to, with a negative test, if you are told that it is negative, what percent chance do you have of actually getting a negative test but havin...

For women getting routine pap smear screening, alert, this basic tests have been shown to miss disease in about 50% of cases. Getting repeat testing, meaning at the intervals your gyno suggests helps to catch cancer before it gets to that stage, but we now know that we can do better.  If you have a Normal (Negative) Pap and a Negative  high risk HPV test your chance of getting CIN II or III (moderate or severe dysplasia) in the next three years is very remote. So good reason to get that test! And which test, now there are new test for just the most high risk of the cervix infecting HPV viruses, called the cobas HPV test will specifically test for the HPV 16,18 as well as the other viruses and it is both approved and in many laboratories. It is very important because women who have HPV 16+ are twice as likely to have high grade cervical dysplasia, a CIN 2 or worse than even women who had tested positive for the other high risk HPV viruses. Getting HPV testing, especially if y...

Most women harboring an ovarian cancer will not recognize the fact that a cancer is developing in their ovary. Eventually the cancer becomes more advanced, symptoms may then be pronounced and then the disease is recognized. Some women are taught to recognize signs of ovarian cancer because they are at greater risk of developing ovarian tumors.  Women with BRCA 1 or 2 mutations, those with strong family history of breast or ovarian cancers, women who have never had children, women who have never breastfed, and women who have spent greater portions of their life ovulating because they never used birth control pills are all a bit more likely to get ovarian cancer. These women have been targeted for more careful watching in some studies looking at ways to diagnose ovarian cancer early. If effective screening could be performed, we can identify who these women are who have an ovarian cancer at an earlier stage when it is much more treatable. A screening test is a test for women with n...

What do you say when you see that baby...she looks like the mommy, or he looks like the daddy...but genetically speaking are we half and half, or are we not half and half? Turns out there are ways to inherit, biologically speaking, that have nothing to do with the 46 chromosomes we are all so familiar with. Each of our cells contains hundreds of energy producing mini-cells called mitochondria. And each of those have their own set of genetic material called the genome, and can reproduce on their own. A human egg, or oocyte, has about 100,000 of these, and they all get passed directly to us. The sperm has about 100, and none survive the fertilization process. So maybe Michael Phelps should think his mother for more than just the birthing and the cheerleading, in a real way our athletic ability is very directly related to our moms! There are also, unfortunately, genetic diseases that are passed on by these mother-inherited mitochondria. So we are more like our mothers. For instance...