Cleaning your house and your mind

During the time that i was between jobs, I stayed at home getting bored every day as I browsed and applied for vacancies that I could find in the craigslist or monster.com

It was during this time that I decided to clean the house, room for room.

I started with the kitchen. I discovered that my ref was colored pearl white and not peach. hehehe.

I scrubbed it so hard that it sparkled and smelled pine.

While doing this chore, I forgot my anxiety of not having a job.

I cleaned next the stove. The greases and the hardened food crumbs that accumulated under the stove bid good-bye.

By the time I finished the whole house, i felt tired but was happy.

This study confirms what I observed when I made the general house cleaning.

Working up a sweat while performing household chores may not just improve the cleanliness of your home, but your mental health too, a survey suggests.

Just 20 minutes of sustained exercise a week - from cleaning to jogging - can impact upon depression, the British Journal of Sports Medicine study found.

The more strenuous and frequent the activity, the greater the effect.

University College London researchers looked at a survey of 20,000 people on weekly exercise and state of mind.

Love Your Feet

I just talked with my best lady friend of mine. She was in the hospital for infected wound on her foot. The doctor tested her for diabetes because she complained that the wound was not responding to antibiotics.

Several years ago, a friend of my mother convinced me to have a pedicure. I was afraid that she may not be able to get all the ingrown nails and my toes might get infected.

A day after the pedicure, I got pus in my toe.

I like the tattood feet in the picture. It is henna. An Indian friend of mine gave me the henna and also some jewelries for the feet. Another friend cautioned me of using the anklets. He said that there are several kinds of these which tell what kind of a woman is wearing that kind of feet jewelry.

Hair Loss

Androgenic alopecia is the most common cause for hair loss for both men and women.

There are other causes of hair loss.

Alopecia Areata

The hair falls for unknown reason. It does not result to complete baldness--only a smooth patch about the size of a coin.

Childbirth

My mother used to explain the hair loss during pregnancy and childbirth to the baby getting most of the nutrition supposed to be for the mother.

The loss of hair may last up to six months after delivery.

High Fever and`severe infection


The loss of hair is temporary.

Lack of Protein

Diets that limit protein intake may cause hair loss. Not until, the person gets adequate protein will the problem be solved.

Medications

There are prescription and over-the-counter medications that may cause falling of hair. These medications include those four gouts, hypertension, depression, arhritis and heart.

Cancer treatments

The person may lose 90 per cent of scalp hair. It is going to grow back when the treatment is over.

Coffee Helps Older Women Ward off Mental Decline

This is a good news for senior women who are afraid to suffer dementia.

Coffee 'protects female memory'
Caffeine may help older women ward off mental decline, research suggests.

French researchers compared women aged 65 and older who drank more than three cups of coffee per day with those who drank one cup or less per day.

Those who drank more caffeine showed less decline in memory tests over a four year period.

The study, published in the journal Neurology, raises the possibility that caffeine may even protect against the development of dementia.


The results held up even after factors such as education, high blood pressure and disease were taken into account.

Caffeine is a known psychostimulant, but this study appears to suggest its effects may be more profound.

However, lead researcher Dr Karen Ritchie of the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research warned against jumping to premature conclusions.

She said: "While we have some ideas as to how this works biologically, we need to have a better understanding of how caffeine affects the brain before we can start promoting caffeine intake as a way to reduce cognitive decline.

"But the results are interesting - caffeine use is already widespread and it has fewer side effects than other treatments for cognitive decline, and it requires a relatively small amount for a beneficial effect."

The study, which involved 7,000 women, did not find that caffeine consumers had lower rates of dementia.

Dr Ritchie said: "We really need a longer study to look at whether caffeine prevents dementia; it might be that caffeine could slow the dementia process rather than preventing it."

She said it was not clear why the protective effect did not seem to apply to men.

"Women may be more sensitive to the effects of caffeine. Their bodies may react differently to the stimulant, or they may metabolize caffeine differently."

Rebecca Wood, chief executive of the Alzheimer's Research Trust, said that with no cure for Alzheimer's disease yet available, research into possible protective factors was important, particularly as the disease is expected to become more common.

She said: "This study does not suggest that caffeine actually lowers rates of dementia in women, but since memory seems improved, it may be that it is slowing it down.

"However, research over a much longer period is still needed to establish fully what the affects of caffeine are in both men and women and whether it could reduce a person's risk of dementia or slow down its progress."

Dr Susanne Sorensen, head of research at the Alzheimer's Society, said drinking coffee and tea had both been tipped as possible ways of delaying the onset of dementia.

However, she said: "These types of studies are complex because coffee and tea drinking can be linked to so many other social and life style factors."

Story from BBC NEWS:

Study shows that Coffee protect women against age-related memory decline

A study conducted among 7,000 men and women in France showed that older women can prevent age-related memory decline by drinking more coffee.

This is the excerpt of the news from Reuters.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Drinking more than three cups of coffee a day helped protect older women against some age-related memory decline, French researchers said on Monday, giving women more reason to love the world's most popular stimulant.

Men did not enjoy the same benefit, they said.

"The more coffee one drank, the better the effects seemed to be on (women's) memory functioning in particular," said Karen Ritchie at the French National Institute of Medical Research, whose work appears in the journal Neurology.

The researchers followed more than 7,000 men and women in three French cities, checking their health and mental function and asking them about their current and past eating and drinking habits, their friends, and their daily activities.

They used this information to sort out the specific role caffeine played in these women's lives.

They found that women who drank more than three cups of coffee per day, or its caffeine equivalent in tea, retained more of their verbal and -- to a lesser extent -- visual memories over four years.

menstrual+cycle,women,menopause,hormones

Vagina Monologues Not

And I thought, this vagina making business is only for sex-change or transgender operation. The latest news is about the reconstruction of vaginas for women.

Excerpt of the news:

An Italian doctor has reconstructed vaginas for two women born with a rare congenital deformation, using their own cells to build vaginal tissue in the lab for the first time.

Dr. Cinzia Marchese of Rome’s Policlinico Umberto I hospital, giving details of the operations on Wednesday, told Reuters a 28-year-old woman who underwent the first such operation a year ago now has a healthy vagina.

“She has got married and is living a normal life,” said Marchese, whose study has been published in the journal Human Reproduction.

The second operation was carried out on a 17-year-old girl on Tuesday and the first signs are that the cells taken by biopsy from the area where her vagina should grow and provide mucosal tissue.

Mucosal tissue is found inside the vagina, the mouth and elsewhere in the body and has important attributes distinct from ordinary skin.

The two women had a condition called Mayer-Von Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser Syndrome, or MRKHS for short, which affects an estimated one in 4,000 to 5,000 female infants.

Read the entire news here.

menstrual+cycle,women,natural vagina,women's health

10 Minute Exercise Can lower High Blood Pressure for Overweight Women

A study supported by hard medical data showed that women do not necessarily have to go to the gymn for a couple of hours running in the treadmill or lifting weights. Even a ten-minute exercise that can improve their fitness may lower blood pressure thus lowering the overall risk of early death.

This is the news from MSNBC.

The study is the first to reinforce using hard medical data what other studies have suggested — that exercise does not have to be an all-or-nothing venture, Dr. Timothy Church of Louisiana State University and colleagues said.

“This information can be used to support future recommendations and should be encouraging to sedentary adults who find it difficult to find the time for 150 minutes of activity per week, let alone 60 minutes per day,” the researchers wrote in their report, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

While virtually everybody knows that exercise is good for you, 20 percent of U.S. adults admit they do no exercise whatever and most do not get as much as is recommended.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health recommend at least a half hour on most days a week of moderate exercise to reduce the risk of heart disease, stroke and cancer.

The Institute of Medicine, which advises the federal government, says people need to get themselves slightly out of breath for closer to an hour every day.

Housework, playing in the park
But Church and colleagues wanted to see whether women overwhelmed at the idea of that much work might be helped by something they consider a little more manageable.

They studied 427 overweight women with high or borderline-high blood pressure who had an average age of 57.

The volunteers were randomly assigned to continue their normal lives or to exercise 75 minutes a week, 135 minutes a week or 190 minutes a week. This works out to just what the NIH and CDC recommend, half as much as recommended, and 150 percent of what they recommend.

“The women in this study walked on treadmills and rode stationary cycles, but any activity of comparable energy expenditure would produce similar results,” said Dr. Steven Blair of the University of South Carolina, who worked on the study.

“Any type of moderate intensity physical activity should provide comparable benefits to those seen in our study. And that’s good news. This can include work around the house and yard, swimming, playing in the park with your grandchildren, or other activities that are of a similar intensity to brisk walking.”

menstrual+cycle,women,high blood pressure,women's health

Mammogram

I had three cyst operations in my breasts in my early 20's so that whoever OB-GYNE who looked in my health records recommend me for a mammogram.

Last year, I was recommended to a program which gives free mammogram check-up. The result required me to have an ultra sound of my breast to double check a lump that the mammogram machine detected in my right breast.

Although the ultrasound test yielded a benign cyst, the doctor schedule me for another breast examination after six months.

This news therefore caught my interest.

After rising steadily for decades, the proportion of U.S. women getting mammograms to screen for breast cancer has dropped for the first time, federal researchers are reporting today.

The overall rate at which women are undergoing regular mammograms fell 4 percent between 2000 and 2005, marking the first significant decline since use of the breast X-rays started expanding rapidly in 1987, the study by the National Cancer Institute and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.

The reasons remain unclear, but researchers speculated that it could be due to factors such as increasingly long waiting times to get appointments, waning fears about breast cancer, the drop in hormone use after menopause, and the ongoing debate over the benefits and risks of the breast exams.

Regardless of the cause, the trend is worrying breast cancer experts, who credit mammograms with playing a crucial role in reducing the death toll from breast cancer, the second leading cause of cancer and cancer death among U.S. women.

"This is very troubling," said Nancy Breen, who led the analysis published online today by the American Cancer Society's journal Cancer. "If women are not getting mammograms, then their cancer may not be diagnosed until later stages, which could translate into higher mortality from breast cancer."

Breast cancer strikes more than 200,000 women each year and kills more than 40,000. But the odds of surviving have been rising, in part because more women are being diagnosed with the help of mammograms at the earliest, most treatable stages. Breast cancer experts have been growing increasingly concerned, however, by reports that mammography rates had leveled off and perhaps started to fall. The new research is the first to document the trend nationally.

Breen and her colleagues analyzed data collected by the National Health Interview Survey, an ongoing survey of about 40,000 adults conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics to track health trends.

Data from about 10,000 women surveyed showed that the mammogram rate plateaued in 2000, began to fall in 2003 and continued to decline through 2005, the survey's most recent year. The proportion of women in the National Health Interview Survey who said they had gotten a mammogram in the last two years declined from 70 percent in 2000 to 66 percent in 2005, according to the paper that will be published in the June 15 issue of the journal.

Most alarming, the drop was greatest -- 6.8 percent -- among women ages 50 to 64, the age group most likely to benefit.

This is also the group most likely to take hormones after the onset of menopause, a practice that fell dramatically in 2002 after a federal study found that hormone therapy raised the risk of breast cancer, heart attack and stroke.

Breen and her colleagues were also surprised that the drop was especially steep -- 6.3 percent -- among more affluent women.

"One possibility is women who stop using HRT (hormone replacement therapy) believe their risk of breast cancer has declined and so they don't feel the need for mammography," Breen said. "Another possibility is they may not be going to their doctors as often for their hormones and so are not being told it's time for a mammogram. That's a concern because just because they are not taking HRT does not mean they are not at risk."

Another possible explanation is that a worsening shortage of mammography facilities is making it more frustrating to get an appointment.

Breen and others speculated that some of the drop might be due to the ongoing debate over the benefits of mammography. Some experts question the blanket recommendation that all women routinely undergo mammograms starting at age 40, saying the risks of unnecessary treatment and anxiety from false alarms might outweigh the benefits for some women at low risk.

"Some women are beginning to balance the risks and the benefits," said Carolina Hinestrosa of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, an advocacy group. "If women are making a careful determination and an informed decision after weighing the risks and benefits, I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing."

But others argued that the benefits have been well-established, particularly for women over age 50. Even though other methods, such as MRIs, are showing promise, mammograms remain the only widespread screening method proven to pay off.

"Too many women and clinicians are misunderstanding the 'controversy' about mammography," said Constance Lehman, a professor of radiology at the University of Washington. "A mammogram is the best thing a woman can do to reduce her chances of dying from breast cancer."

Another possible explanation is that rising survival rates among breast cancer patients are making women more complacent.

"Women may also be feeling, 'Well, the death rates are dropping in the population so I don't need to get screened,' " Breen said. "That's kind of missing the point. One reason death rates are dropping is because screening rates were so high."

menstrual+cycle,women,high blood pressure,women's health