No Link Between ‘the Pill’ and Birth Defects: Study

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Becoming pregnant while taking birth control pills doesn’t seem to increase the risk of birth defects, a new study suggests.

Researchers found similar rates of birth defects — about 25 infants out of 1,000 — among women who never used birth control pills and those who took them before pregnancy or took them before realizing they were pregnant.

“Women who become pregnant either soon after stopping oral contraceptives, or even while taking them, should know that this exposure is unlikely to cause the fetus to develop a birth defect,” said lead researcher Brittany Charlton.

“This should reassure women as well as their doctors,” said Charlton, an instructor in the department of epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.

However, she cautioned that this study can’t prove that birth control pills don’t cause birth defects, only that there appears to be no link.

Dr. Jennifer Wu, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, said the study findings aren’t surprising.

“It’s something we have known for a while,” she said. Still, “many women in the United States are on birth control pills, so it’s reassuring to know that they don’t cause any birth defects, and women don’t have to worry about it during pregnancy.”

Although oral contraceptives are highly effective at preventing pregnancy, about 9 percent of women get pregnant the first year of using them. Usually this is because they missed a dose or used other medications — including anti-seizure drugs, antibiotics, antidepressants or some HIV drugs — that can make the contraceptive less effective, Charlton said.

In many other cases, women stop taking “the pill” when they want to conceive and become pregnant within a few months.

Whether the hormones in birth control pills could affect fetal development when used around the time of conception hasn’t been well-studied, the study authors explained in background notes.

For the study, the researchers used national medical registries to collect data from Denmark from 1997 to 2011 on all live births, birth defects and mothers’ medical conditions.

Among more than 880,000 births, 2.5 percent of the babies had a birth defect such as a cleft palate or an arm or leg defect, the researchers found.

Specifically, Charlton’s team found that for every 1,000 births, 25.1 infants of mothers who never used the pill had birth defects, as did 25.0 of infants of mothers who had used birth control pills more than three months before pregnancy. The rate was 24.9 among mothers who used birth control pills within three months of becoming pregnant, and 24.8 among mothers who used the pill before realizing they were pregnant.

“The prevalence of birth defects was consistent across each of the oral contraceptive groups as well as when we added in pregnancies that ended as stillbirths or induced abortions,” Charlton said. “Similarly, the results were also consistent even when we broke down the birth defects into different subgroups, like limb defects,” she added.

In all, the study found that 68 percent of mothers had used birth control pills, but stopped more than three months before pregnancy, and 21 percent had never used them. Also, 8 percent of the women had stopped using oral contraceptives within three months of conception, and 1 percent used them after getting pregnant, the researchers said.

Charlton’s team excluded any infants with defects caused by known factors, such as fetal alcohol syndrome or chromosomal abnormalities.

The researchers also accounted for risk factors that could increase the odds of a birth defect. These included the mother’s age, household income, level of education, history of birth defects, smoking during pregnancy, use of prescription drugs and hospital admissions.

The study findings were published online Jan. 6 in BMJ.

According to Wu, this study shows that women shouldn’t worry that getting pregnant while on a birth control pill will cause an abnormal pregnancy.

More information

For more about birth control, visit the U.S. Office on Women’s Health.

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Virus That Causes Birth Defects Could Spread to Mainland U.S.

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A rare virus spread by mosquitoes linked to severe birth defects in Brazil has spread to Puerto Rico and health officials worry it could travel to the continental U.S.

The Zika virus was long thought to be harmless, but recently it has been linked to a neurological disorder called microcephaly, which can stymie brain development in newborn babies. The condition causes babies to be born with abnormally small heads and can lead to early death. More than 2,400 suspected cases of the brain condition have been reported in Brazil since the Zika virus was first reported there early last year, according to government documents posted online by CNN. The country’s government has asked that families temporarily hold off on pregnancies.

The disease has appeared elsewhere in South and Central America and recently spread to the U.S. via Puerto Rico in a case reported last week. Now, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have warned U.S. travelers to the region, especially pregnant women, to take special caution to avoid mosquito bites. The disease is likely to follow the patterns of other mosquito-borne illnesses and wind up in the Southern Gulf states and Hawaii, according to a CDC official cited in the New York Times.

Symptoms of Zika, including fever, rash and headaches, are unpleasant, but the virus is not thought to lead to death in healthy adults. There is no medicine or vaccine to treat it. And, while health officials have called on the population to remain vigilant, they ask that people not overreact.

“There is no reason for alarm, and the public should continue to take commonsense steps to avoid mosquito bites,” Pedro Pierluisi, Puerto Rico’s non-voting U.S. congressman, said in a statement.

This article originally appeared on Time.com.

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You Won’t Believe How Often Women Criticize Themselves in a Single Day

Photo: Getty Images

As women we are really hard on ourselves, particularly in terms of physical appearance. But just how critical we are may shock you.

When Weight Watchers surveyed 2,000 women in the U.K. ranging in age from 18 to 60, they learned that the typical female criticizes herself a whopping eight times a day, most likely even before she’s had her morning coffee.

The critiques that came up the most included feeling too fat, fretting over messy hair, and thinking their midsection looks way too big. Feeling inferior on social media was also commonly mentioned.

RELATED: Thoughts Every Woman Has During a Bikini Wax

“Today’s hectic and visually driven world has meant that we’re seeing a rise in women being self-critical, from the way they look to the way they feel at work,” said Zoe Griffiths, the head of public health and programme at Weight Watchers, in a statement. “Our research has shown that being unkind to ourselves has been an underlying theme for women for many years, but a set of very modern cultural conditions have increased the intensity of this unkindness which are hard to avoid.”

The survey, which is part of Weight Watchers’ #WomanKind campaign, also found a common quality women wished they had included feeling more confident.

RELATED: 22 Body-Positive Photos of Celebrities in Bikinis

This is so not okay. If ever there was a reason to offer ourselves a little love it’s these incredibly sad findings. We are too amazing to let these thoughts continue to creep into our heads each and every day. Let’s kick those New Year’s resolutions to the curb and start loving who we are right now, because we deserve it.

This article originally appeared on MIMIchatter.com.

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This Smart Skin Patch Can Tell You if You’re Getting Too Much Sun

Photo: courtesy of La Roche-Posay

You know that you’ve got to protect your skin from the sun’s penetrating rays, but have you ever wondered how much sun exposure you’re actually getting? Thanks to a clever new product from the beauty giant L’Oreal, you’ll soon be able to measure your sun exposure with the help of a high-tech sensor called My UV Patch.

The company—more commonly known for its makeup products—unveiled its foray in wearable tech today at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The patch looks almost like a band-aid, and contains photosensitive dyes that change color when exposed to the sun’s skin-damaging ultraviolet (UV) rays, according to a press release. The stick-on is stretchy, disposable, and can be placed anywhere on the body for up to five days.

RELATED: 7 Simple Steps for Head-to-Toe Sun Protection

Wearers can then upload a photo of their patch to the My UV Patch app, and get feedback about exactly how much UV exposure their skin received. The idea is that people can use the information to inform the level of sun protection they need.

The company plans to include the patch free with any purchase of La Roche-Posay brand sunscreens later this year.

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Some Women Face Geographic Barriers to Breast Reconstruction

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Long distances to treatment centers are a significant obstacle for some women seeking breast reconstruction after a mastectomy, a new study finds.

“While greater patient awareness and insurance coverage have contributed to greater breast reconstruction rates in the United States, geographic barriers to access this service remain, particularly to academic centers,” wrote the study’s authors, led by Dr. Evan Matros from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

The researchers used the National Cancer Database to examine the association between breast reconstruction and the travel distance of more than 1 million American women who had a mastectomy between 1998 and 2011.

During this time period, the overall rate of immediate breast reconstruction jumped from about 11 percent to more than 32 percent, the investigators found.

The upward trend may reflect the Women’s Health and Cancer Rights Act of 1998, which requires insurance companies to pay for breast reconstruction after mastectomy, the researchers suggested. Implant-based reconstructions increased the most, but breast reconstructions involving patients’ own tissue also rose, the study found.

The researchers found that treatment travel distances for patients having breast reconstruction increased from 1998 to 2011, but the same was not true for women who didn’t have the surgery.

The findings were published in the January issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

“Patients who underwent mastectomy with immediate reconstruction had to travel significantly greater distances than patients who did not undergo reconstruction,” the study authors wrote in a journal news release.

“The greater distance traveled by women undergoing breast reconstruction, as compared to mastectomy without reconstruction, suggests the presence of a geographic disparity,” they concluded.

Roughly 14 percent of the women who traveled less than 20 miles underwent reconstruction, compared to almost one-quarter of the women traveling between 100 and 200 miles, the study found.

Women treated at academic hospitals were most likely to undergo breast reconstruction. The study revealed 26 percent of these women had the procedure, compared to 20 percent treated at comprehensive community hospitals and 10 percent treated at community hospitals.

The average travel distance for women treated at both types of community hospitals was about 20 miles, but women treated at academic hospitals traveled an average of 47 miles, the researchers found.

Travel distance for women who underwent reconstruction with their own tissue at high-volume hospitals more than doubled over the study period to 53 miles. The study authors said this reflects the concentration of specialized centers in metropolitan areas.

The researchers suggested that more needs to be done to eliminate the barriers preventing women from accessing breast reconstruction after mastectomy. “Greater numbers of plastic surgeons, especially in community [hospitals], would be one method of addressing this inequality,” they wrote.

More information

The American Cancer Society has more about breast reconstruction after mastectomy.

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Antibody May Lower Rejection Rates After Stem Cell Transplant in Leukemia Patients

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — People with acute leukemia who were given antibody therapy before a stem cell transplant fared better than those who didn’t receive the treatment, a small study found.

Stem cell transplantation allows doctors to give higher doses of cancer-killing chemotherapy, according to the American Cancer Society. However, the odds of the body rejecting the transplanted stem cells are very high — a condition called graft-versus-host disease, the study authors explained.

By treating patients first with animal-derived antibodies, called antihuman T-lymphocyte immune globulin (ATG), the researchers were able to lower the threat of rejection in patients.

“Graft-versus-host disease is the most serious complication after stem cell transplantation,” said lead researcher Dr. Francesca Bonifazi, from the Institute of Hematology at Bologna University in Italy.

“Using [ATG] reduces the risk of complications of stem cell transplants without increasing the risk of leukemia recurrence and infections,” she added.

After an average follow-up of two years, 32 percent of the patients given ATG had chronic graft-versus-host disease. But, almost 69 percent of patients who weren’t given ATG had graft-versus-host disease, Bonifazi said.

“Stem cell transplantation is a curative option for several blood diseases and for acute leukemia in particular, which represents the most frequent indication for transplant,” she said.

“The risk of severe complications that can be life-threatening or severely affect the quality of life can be significantly reduced without decreasing transplant efficacy,” Bonifazi said.

The findings was published Jan. 7 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study included 168 leukemia patients treated at 27 different centers. The volunteers were randomly assigned to receive ATG or not.

At two years, the survival rate was similar in patients who received ATG or didn’t. But, the rate of survival in which they were free from chronic graft-versus-host disease and cancer recurrence was significantly better among patients given the antibody — 37 percent versus 17 percent, the researchers found.

“Here, by using [ATG] prior to transplant, we show that the risk of chronic graft-versus-host disease is significantly reduced without an increase of cancer relapse,” said study co-author Dr. Nicolaus Kroger. He is director of the department of stem cell transplantation at University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany.

Lee Greenberger is chief scientific officer for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, based in White Plains, N.Y. Commenting on the new research, he said that “chronic graft-versus-host disease, which can occur after transplantation for the treatment of leukemia, continues to be a major limitation to conventional transplantation therapy. This study demonstrates that this antibody appears to significantly reduce the incidence of chronic graft-versus-host disease, and may improve the quality of life without a negligible effect on survival.”

Greenberger added that “this advance, coupled with previous studies and other ongoing trials with this antibody in transplant, may be of significant benefit to patients with blood cancer in need of a bone marrow transplant.”

More information

Visit the U.S. National Cancer Institute for more on leukemia.

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Hard Lessons Learned From the Ebola Fight

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — The Ebola epidemic in West Africa has been a human tragedy of terrible proportion, leaving 11,315 dead since it began in March 2014.

But the epidemic in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — the largest Ebola outbreak in history — also has provided a unique opportunity to study what had been a rare virus, potentially arming researchers with the know-how to protect people against future outbreaks.

A trio of papers in the Jan. 7 New England Journal of Medicine reveal some of what has been learned about the virus, which has sickened more than 28,000 people:

• Women infected with Ebola had a higher survival rate than men, raising questions about what caused this advantage.
• An anti-malaria drug used when doctors ran out of their usual medication wound up reducing patients’ risk of death by more than 30 percent.
• The much-hyped strategy of using blood plasma from Ebola survivors to help treat future patients appears to be a bust, offering no significant survival advantage to those who received transfusions.

“The thing these three papers have in common is that they’re really showing there’s a concerted effort to conduct research on Ebola, and there’s a major opportunity to learn more — so much more — about Ebola than we ever could prior to the outbreak in West Africa,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an Ebola expert and senior associate at the UPMC Center for Health Security, in Baltimore.

In the first paper, members of the World Health Organization’s Ebola Response Team found that women were less likely to die than men from Ebola infection.

About 63 percent of women died compared with 67 percent of men, even though both genders had a similar risk of contracting the virus, researchers reported.

The WHO team ruled out age, the severity of symptoms and the time it took for the patient to be hospitalized as factors that might explain the advantage women had over men, said Christl Donnelly, a team member and a professor of statistical epidemiology at Imperial College London in England.

“We were not able to identify what drove the observed difference,” Donnelly said.

“It does show there may be some interaction with gender and Ebola,” Adalja said. “We know that females do face infectious disease differently than males. There are genetic and hormonal differences that could be at play and will give us more of an understanding of who lives and dies with Ebola.”

The research team noted that male Ebola patients tended to take about a half-day longer to get to the hospital, which could increase the risk they would transmit the disease to someone else.

The second paper, by a Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres) team, presents the results of what Adalja called a “natural clinical trial” for an anti-malarial drug combo called artesunate-amodiaquine.

Suspected Ebola patients receive treatment for both Ebola and malaria, Adalja said. Patients often are suffering from both diseases, but sometimes patients have malaria that resembles Ebola.

In August 2014, at the peak of the epidemic in Liberia, the Doctors Without Borders team ran out of its first-line anti-malarial medication, artemether-lumefantrine, said study lead author Dr. Iza Ciglenecki.

Patients admitted during this period were given another commonly used anti-malarial drug, artesunate-amodiaquine, said Ciglenecki, project manager of the organization’s Initiative for Innovations.

“This situation, in many ways, resembles random allocation of anti-malarial drugs, as it was only determined by the time when the patient came to the treatment center and not by clinicians’ preferences nor patients’ characteristics,” Ciglenecki added.

It turned out that patients given artesunate-amodiaquine treatment were 31 percent less likely to die than those who received the usual treatment, doctors learned.

The results can be read in one of two ways, Adalja said. It could be that artesunate-amodiaquine is somehow effective against Ebola, particularly given that amodiaquine has been shown to have anti-Ebola virus activity in laboratory studies.

But it also could be that the first-line drug, artemether-lumefantrine, is more dangerous than previously thought. “As of now, people maybe shouldn’t be using that first-line drug, and should be moving to this other drug,” Adalja said.

The third study focused on the practice of treating new Ebola patients with plasma drawn from survivors, in hopes that the plasma contains antibodies that would boost their immune response.

Several of the Ebola patients treated in the United States received these transfusions, and some suspected the plasma might have accounted for the fact that most U.S. patients survived.

But after controlling for other factors, researchers concluded that 84 patients who received the plasma got no benefit over others who didn’t get a transfusion.

“They didn’t show a benefit, which was something people sort of expected based on earlier data,” Adalja said.

More information

For more on Ebola, visit the World Health Organization.

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Blood Test May Help Rule Out Pregnancy Complication: Study

By Amy Norton
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — A new blood test might help doctors identify pregnant women who are unlikely to develop a dangerous complication called pre-eclampsia, despite having suspicious signs or symptoms.

That’s the finding of a study in the Jan. 7 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Experts said that if the results are confirmed by further research, the test could go a long way in ruling out pre-eclampsia in women with suspected cases.

That’s important because right now, women with possible pre-eclampsia are usually hospitalized for close monitoring, said Dr. Ellen Seely, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

A reliable test that could spare women that hospital stay would have a “substantial impact,” said Seely, who wrote an editorial published with the study.

Anywhere from 2 percent to 8 percent of pregnant women develop pre-eclampsia, according to the March of Dimes.

The condition, which occurs after the 20th week of pregnancy, is marked by high blood pressure and other signs that a woman’s organs — such as the kidneys and liver — aren’t functioning properly. Symptoms can include protein in the urine, as well as severe headaches and vision problems.

Detecting pre-eclampsia early is “essential,” because it carries serious risks for mothers and babies, said Dr. Stefan Verlohren, senior researcher on the new study and a consultant in maternal/fetal medicine at Charite University Medicine, in Berlin, Germany.

Pre-eclampsia can lead to preterm delivery and low birth weight. It also raises a woman’s risk of seizures and coma, and placental abruption — where the placenta separates from the uterus, sometimes causing life-threatening bleeding.

The problem, Verlohren said, is that it can be difficult to know when a woman is developing pre-eclampsia. For example, women who show elevated blood pressure later in pregnancy could be in the early stages of pre-eclampsia, or they could have isolated high blood pressure.

So his team looked at whether a blood test could help predict whether women with suspected pre-eclampsia would be diagnosed with the disorder in the next week.

The test measures the ratio of two proteins in the blood. One, called sFlt-1, inhibits new blood vessels from forming; the other, known as PlGF, encourages blood vessel formation. Studies have shown that women with pre-eclampsia tend to have high levels of sFlt-1, but relatively low levels of PlGF — a sign of compromised blood flow to the placenta.

Verlohren’s team used blood samples from more than 1,000 women who were between the 24th and 37th week of pregnancy, all of whom had suspected pre-eclampsia.

Each woman had at least one sign or symptom of the complication, but did not meet the criteria doctors use to definitively diagnose it, Verlohren said.

In a first group, of 500 women, the researchers found that a test result of 38 appeared to be the key cutoff number. They then validated that in another 550 patients.

It turned out that women with a test result of 38 or lower remained free of pre-eclampsia for the next week more than 99 percent of the time, the investigators found.

“This is a test that can tell a woman she’s extremely unlikely to develop pre-eclampsia in the next week,” Seely said.

But what it can’t do, she added, is predict which women will develop the complication. Only about 37 percent of study patients with a result higher than 38 developed pre-eclampsia in the next four weeks.

It’s also unclear how exactly the test should be used in the real world. “This study does not address the question of how to use it in practice,” Seely said.

For one, it reliably ruled out pre-eclampsia, but only for the next week. Seely said it’s not known whether the test would continue to perform as well if a woman were retested after a week.

Verlohren said a clinical trial is underway in the United Kingdom to see whether the test — with its one-week prediction — can reduce unnecessary hospital stays for pre-eclampsia monitoring.

The test’s manufacturer, Roche Diagnostics, funded the new study, and Verlohren and several co-researchers have financial ties to the company.

If the test can help many women avoid the hospital, the benefits would be significant, Seely said.

“Hospitalization takes women away from their families, including any children they have at home,” she pointed out. “The stress is substantial. If that can be avoided it would have a big impact on their quality of life.”

More information

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has more on pre-eclampsia and high blood pressure.

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1 in 10 Medicaid Recipients Gets Drugs to Quit Smoking

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Roughly one in 10 U.S. smokers using Medicaid insurance gets medications to help quit smoking, with a wide variation between states, a new study finds.

Under the Affordable Care Act, state Medicaid programs must cover at least some counseling and approved therapies such as nicotine gum and anti-smoking drugs such as bupropion (Zyban, Wellbutrin) and varenicline (Chantix). The drugs ease withdrawal symptoms and reduce cravings for cigarettes, the researchers said.

But even if people on Medicaid who smoke want to quit, states don’t always help. State Medicaid programs may prevent them from getting anti-smoking drugs through policies such as high cost-sharing or prior authorization requirements, said researchers at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

The study found that in 2013, the use of anti-smoking drugs by smokers with Medicaid coverage ranged from less than 1 percent in Texas to about 30 percent in Minnesota. Other states in the top five to provide anti-smoking drugs were Arizona, New Hampshire, Oregon and Utah. Other states in the bottom five were Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi and Rhode Island, the researchers said.

“These data show that most Medicaid programs could do much more to help smokers quit,” said lead author Leighton Ku, professor and interim chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at George Washington’s School of Public Health.

“Data from the [U.S.] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that medical treatments for smoking-related diseases will cost the Medicaid program about $75 billion in 2016, but we spend less than one-quarter of 1 percent of that amount to help smokers quit,” Ku said in a university news release.

Smoking is the leading cause of preventable disease in the United States. About one-third of adults with Medicaid coverage smoke, about twice as many as in the general population, the researchers noted.

“Every state Medicaid program, working with public health departments and others, could make smoking cessation a higher priority to improve health and to lower health care costs,” Ku said.

The study was published in the January issue of the journal Health Affairs.

More information

The American Cancer Society offers a guide to quitting smoking.

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Psych Therapies May Have Long-Term Benefits for Irritable Bowel Patients

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Doctors have long known that psychological therapies such as relaxation and hypnosis can temporarily ease the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). But, new research suggests they could also offer long-term benefits.

IBS is a gastrointestinal disorder that affects up to 16 percent of the U.S. population. It causes chronic abdominal pain, discomfort, bloating, diarrhea or constipation. There’s currently no cure, but dietary changes, medication and psychological interventions can provide symptom relief, the study authors noted.

“Our study is the first one that has looked at long-term effects,” said the study’s senior author, Lynn Walker, a professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in Nashville.

“We found that the moderate benefit that psychological therapies confer in the short term continue over the long term. This is significant because IBS is a chronic, intermittent condition for which there is no good medical treatment,” she said in a hospital news release.

The researchers analyzed results of 41 clinical trials involving more than 2,200 IBS patients.

The analysis found several different psychological therapies — including relaxation, hypnosis and cognitive behavioral therapy — equally beneficial in helping people change the way they think. Regardless of the length of treatment, the researchers found the effects may last at least six to 12 months after treatment ends.

Online treatments were just as effective as those conducted in person, the study, published recently in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, found.

The study’s first author, Kelsey Laird, a doctoral student in Vanderbilt’s clinical psychology program, said, “Western medicine often conceptualizes the mind as separate from the body, but IBS is a perfect example of how the two are connected.

“Gastrointestinal symptoms can increase stress and anxiety, which can increase the severity of the symptoms. This is a vicious cycle that psychological treatment can help break,” she said in the news release.

The researchers next plan to examine the effects of psychological therapies on patients’ ability to function at work, school and during other routine activities.

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases provides more information on IBS.

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