GynoFiles

In a new report that was just released from the Framingham Heart Study, Americans are often five or more years older in heart risk than their true age. They use blood pressure, treatment of hypertension, presence of diabetes, smoking, and BMI to calculate a theoretical heart age, and you can see what your heart age is.  These factors are definitely powerful and actually take into account your cholesterol levels, and exercise as both will effect all of the factors they do use in their heart age calculator. However, other mitigating and adverse factors such as genetic propensity to clotting, hormonal factors, history of pregnancy, weight distribution, depression, and stress may affect these numbers significantly and are not taken into consideration. Once these numbers are calculated, you can receive therapies that potentially reverses the heart aging. If you need a recent BMI or blood pressure reading, come by Women's Health Practice and we can monitor patients easily! If your Fr...

Enjoy whatever your grillmaster,  pizza wizard,  or master chef is serving up this holiday season do enjoy, but realize that there will be some catch up to that feasting: so after enjoying come on in to Women's Health Practice for a three part plan to fit in your best holiday wear by, the next holiday. We especially are going to target the weight we carry in the midline, no matter what your overall BMI and weight is. 1. Customize the Calorie count. 2. Understand the risks and benefits of weight distribution based on your own health 2. Contour Revision, that may mean diet medications or other nutritional strategies. And there are treatments such as Coolsculpting that help. 3. Normalize Your Hormones. Lots of us use our clothes to tell us what size we want to be, and that's not a terrible way to do it. To be even more scientific you can calculate that waist to hip ratio and you should be below .80 . You need to have a realistic approach to calories and the content of yo...

Three are some strategies that we know work for everyone, and some strategies that simply work only for the group that has that risk. In heart disease prevention, that can be best illustrated by telling women 'not to smoke' meaning that every single person that quits cigarette smoking will lessen her risk of heart disease. But, if you aren't a smoker, of course, that won't work for you. The newest strategy for prevention of strokes and heart attacks is a new tool that is better powered for age, and ethnicity, and the use of medication. It can be found on line, in the professional section of the American Heart Association web site. For all women and men, learn the couple of simple steps that can make you a heart saver.

The pap test and HPV testing on the pap is a cellular biopsy to determine the health of your cervix. We have arrived at the concept of a "liquid biopsy," for some organs meaning that we can check the health of that organ with the appropriate blood test. In some cases this actually means harvesting cells from the blood stream. In the case of the cardiovascular system it means determining the nature of levels that correlate with the condition of your blood tests. But Heart Health means overall cardiovascular system health. Your blood pressure should be normal, your heart should beat at a modest pace, and your blood vessel walls should be pristine clear of inflammation and plaque build up. How we determined this used to be a weight, a blood pressure check and a cholesterol measurement. The addition of lipid tests that are beyond the cholesterol number, and delve into the fat and carbohydrate metabolism has been the newest frontier in heart health testing. But we can look at he...

Hot flashes and hot flushes are a common and a persistent problem for women as they transition into menopause. Whether she is aware, or flashing when she has no awareness, virtually all women can be shown with extremely sensitive testing to have some sort of  hot flashes and or vasomotor symptoms. In fact the government has issued guidelines for women to encourage treatment if she's symptomatic. The worst symptoms are likely to be during perimenopause, which is when a woman transitions from regular cycles into menopause, and you are likely to experience hot flashes, and if so these will persist in a bothersome way for up to 2 years. For other women the symptom persistence is  it is much longer. It does not hurt (clear this with your own gyno, as there are some contraindications) to try non hormonal methods which include black cohosh, red clover extracts or soy, or flaxseed. Similarly it has not been shown that Vitamin E is helpful A cancer treatment group, in conjunction wit...