Dear Readers, Ten years ago, millions of women stopped taking hormone replacement therapy after the Women’s Health Initiative clinical trial showed that the treatment put them at risk for breast cancer, strokes, and heart attacks. Now with additional research, medical experts are reassessing the risks and benefits and recommending a more reasonable individualized approach to...
Dear Readers, Doctors and researchers debate the cause of the increased incidence of thyroid cancer and bemoan the inconclusive nature of diagnoses, which often requires intrusive surgery to determine if a patient has a malignancy. Fortunately, thyroid cancer is a very treatable cancer, but the treatments can also be controversial. In this issue, four physicians...
The people who brought us the sexual revolution of the 1960s are now senior citizens. Many are still going strong—enjoying careers, traveling, playing sports, and, yes, having sex. Although no longer concerned about unwanted pregnancies, this population often needs a refresher course in sex education to deal with today’s sexual issues, Melissa Mapes writes in...
Dear Readers, The 1996 discovery of kisspeptin in the human brain added significantly to understanding how children turn into adults. For this issue, we invited three medical experts to give their perspectives on how kisspeptin functions and what promise it holds for developing treatments for pubertal and reproductive disorders (page 14). Kisspeptin owes its whimsical...
Dear Readers, In the last decade, many of our most admired athletes have been ig- nominiously brought down for using performance-enhancing drugs and subsequently stripped of their medals and awards. As the summer Olympics gets under way in London this month, officials will be working diligently to expose participants who use drugs to gain an...
Dear Readers, At some point, women of reproduc- tive age have to factor in whether they would like to have children. The deci- sion is most difficult for those who are overweight or obese, because their body type impedes fertility and contracep- tion. Three experts size up the clini- cal and laboratory evidence for these...
