BREAST CANCER: 2015

In case you missed it, October was National Breast Cancer Awareness month, and there were at least two important events:

The first was a wonderful WHEP seminar by “Living Beyond Breast Cancer” including a very impactful panel discussion with four survivors,

and the second was a change in the American Cancer Society (ACS) guidelines for mammography screening (published October 20, 2015 in the Journal of the American Medical Association).

A little history...

In 2003, the ACS recommended annual mammograms for all women starting at age 40 and continuing as long as a woman remained in good health, and clinical breast examination periodically for women in their 20s and 30s and annually for women 40 years and older.

Contrast that with the new recommendations:

Women with an “average risk” of breast cancer – (i.e. most women) – should begin yearly mammograms at age 45.  However, the ACS also states that women should be able to start the screening as early as age 40, if they want to.  We know that about 12% of women in the general population will develop breast cancer sometime during their lives.  For women in their 40s and 50s, randomized trials have shown that screening mammography modestly decreases breast cancer mortality by approximately 15%.

• At age 55, women should have mammograms every other year – though, again, women who prefer to continue yearly mammograms may do so.
• Regular mammograms should continue for as long as a woman is in good health.
• Breast exams, either from a medical provider or self-exams, are no longer recommended.  Still, the ACS says all women should be familiar with how their breasts normally look and feel and report any changes to their health care provider right away.

These guidelines do not pertain to women at “high risk” due to family history, a breast condition, or other reason.  Clearly, women who are BRCA 1 or 2 positive are at high risk for breast cancer as are those with a strong family history (multiple relatives with breast cancer).  But how should we think about risk when breast cancer has occurred in a single first degree relative knowing that women with a "family history" of breast cancer make up only 5 to 7 percent of all women with breast cancer?

Bottom line: the ACS guidelines recommend that screening decisions be individualized to reflect a woman’s values and preferences, as well as her underlying risk of breast cancer.  Is this a “hedge” or a move toward more personalized medicine?

                                                                                                                         Judith Wolf, MD   Associate Director, WHEP

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Taking a Sexual History

The 5 P's of Sexual History Taking:

For additional resources that were not covered in class, please refer to the following on effective Sexual History Taking:

http://www.cdc.gov/std/treatment/sexualhistory.pdf

https://www.cdph.ca.gov/pubsforms/Guidelines/Documents/CA-STD-Clinician-Guide-Sexual-History-Taking.pdf

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1114389/

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Should I be juicing?

 

One of the new and interesting things I have been getting a lot of questions about recently are juice cleanses. These juice cleanses are 1-4 week journeys where people seek to drink nothing but fruits and vegetables in juice form or even only water with different additions like cayenne pepper and honey. As a long time food lover this seemed almost tortuous to me and I wanted to figure out what was behind peoples motivation to try these things. It seemed that in a desperation before the summer to obtain that perfect “beach bod” people were turning to anything they could find including these cleanses. Some people justified it by saying that they felt overloaded with toxins after overeating all winter and others simply saw this as a quick and efficient way to lose some weight. Wondering about some of the pros and cons into juicing and whether or not this could be hurting us I did a little bit of research.

 

   In general when we do not put food into our body our body senses distress and goes into starvation mode. First it begins breaking down any sugar that we had stored in our body as glycogen—we only have about 24 hours of stored glycogen so after that we start breaking down the fats. After the fats start breaking down that’s when we start to get into a bit of trouble and break down our muscles (don’t forget the heart is a muscle too) and this can end up doing significant damage. The other thing is that our livers and kidneys are REMARKABLE organs and in our everyday life are capable of filtering out toxins meaning that as long as we are not poisoning our bodies our livers and kidneys can keep up and do a good job.

 

Usually when a person starts a juice cleanse they might notice a sudden drop in weight which is mostly all water weight, but as the body goes more and more into starvation mode and will eventually store almost anything you feed the body when the diet is over. This means that whatever water weight you lose at the beginning you can end up rebounding and gaining it all back and more when you stop. Another problem is that when you juice the fruits and vegetables you lose a lot of the nutrients that you would normally get just by eating an apple or cucumber.

 

One final thing that I thought about when looking through all these products that they try to sell you to get you to buy into the whole juice cleanse thing is WOW are these products expensive! Is it worth it to get all of these powders or supplements just to lose a few pounds and gain it back? Really we are better off at picking a few things that we can change in our lives—they don’t have to be big changes but they can make a difference. Pack an apple in your lunch instead of potato chips, or even just try cutting out all other drinks besides water—you would be surprised at not only how much weight you might lose but how much better you feel!

 

So skip the juice diets and the water cleanses because you could be permanently lowering your metabolism and setting yourself up for failure in the future once you re-enter the real world of food. Try small things every day—you don’t have to change your entire diet in one day—and make that a permanent change in your life because it will be way more worthwhile and effective in the long term.

-Sarah Hall, MS4

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                           Are Women at Higher Risk for Dementia?       

                                                                                       

FACT: Almost two-thirds of people in the US with Alzheimer's disease are women.
FACT: At age 65, women have a 1:6 chance of developing the disease compared to men, where the chance is 1:11. 


Is it because women tend to live longer than men?  Genetics? Hormones? Cardiovascular health?


While it's true that women outlive men by an average of 5 years, we know that Alzheimer's actually begins long before the diagnosis is made - perhaps as long as 20 years.  And the pace of the disease appears to be faster in women.


It turns out that women who carry an ApoE-4 variant are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's compared to women without the gene.  Whether other factors/co-factors are at play and whether the approach to diagnosis, treatment and prevention should be different in women vs. men remains to be seen.




                                                                                                                        Judith Wolf, MD
                                                                                                                        Associate Director, WHEP

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I am an avid fan of the widely popular Netflix show, Orange is the New Black. I’ve been raving about the show since its first season in 2013, and ever since the conclusion of season two last July, I had been counting the days to the June 12th release of season three. It is not a show that you can just watch one episode at a time- I, along with many others, am a binge watcher. My husband and I watched both seasons one and two in two days. The show is based on its main character, Piper Chapman, played by Taylor Schilling. Chapman (inmates are called my their last names) is sentenced to 15 months in Litchfield Penitentiary, a federal prison in Upstate New York, for a crime (smuggling drug money into another country) she’d committed a decade earlier. It follows Piper’s experience from when she turns herself in to the present. The enthralling part of the show is how it follows several inmates’ lives, explaining what led to the “big house.” Orange is the New Black has plenty of comedy, plenty of drama, and even more OMG moments. In addition, it touches on several Women’s Health Issues that make me curious about the correlation between the show and the lives of real-life female prisoners.  

One of the earliest female health issues came about when inmate Sophia Burset, a transsexual convict, played by Laverne Cox, had to deal with a sudden change the dosage of her hormones due to prison budget cuts. Burset was forced to figure out how to get what she needed to sustain, from trying to persuade older inmates to give her their hormones, to trying to get her wife to smuggle them in during their visits. Eventually, the prison went back to its regular practices, and Burset began to receive again what she needed. If this were to happen in reality, what options would an inmate have?

Inmate Dayanara “Daya” Diaz, played by Dascha Polanco, gets pregnant while incarcerated through a relationship she developed with one of the correctional officers. It’s truly an untraditional love story but sadly, Daya cannot report that she’s pregnant because if anyone finds out, her lover will lose his job and be labeled as a sex offender. While her prison friends and family (her mom is also an inmate) know about the soon coming baby, she is unable to get prenatal care because she cannot admit to the pregnancy.

Inmate Rosa Cisneros, played by Barbara Rosenblat, suffers from cancer. While the type of cancer she has is never stated, Rosa is often transported to chemotherapy visits. Her story line isn’t widely discussed, but often times, inmates complain of mold and other terrible conditions that fester in the prison. It leads you to wonder how she survives in such conditions, when her immune system is so weak.

While Orange is the New Black is a fictional show, it leads me to question the degree to which real-life inmates face similar challenges. As future practitioners of Women’s Health, how can you be leaders of change in the health of incarcerated women?

By Angela Woods

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