Archive for April, 2008

Osteoporosis, another major cause of problems for women

Osteoporosis, another major cause of problems for women in the menopause, it is the major cause of morbidity in women, affecting millions of women, causing millions of fractures each year and costing billions of dollars to treat. It is estimated 25% of all Caucasian women will fracture their spines, 33 will fracture their hips sometime [...]


Cardiovascular disease. Menopause

Cardiovascular disease, this is one of the long term consequences of being in the menopause. Cardiovascular disease is by far the most common cause of death in the postmenopausal woman, accounting for over 500,000 deaths each year. As you can see based on this pie graft, that it accounts for 45% of deaths versus breast [...]


Vicious cycle

It’s a vicious cycle, so as women develop more and more vasomotor symptoms, we also see that carry through into other changes that affect concentration, one may be having anxiety attacks, memory changes, particularly short term memory changes that affects mood and irritability, and then loss of libido becomes an issue as well. This is [...]


Menopause. Generic pharmacy support

Menopause is an essential phase that every woman is going to pass through. It is defined as 12 consecutive months of amenorrhea due to the lack of ovarian function and it’s associated with the inability to reproduce. It is estimated there will be some 35,000,000 women alone passing through the menopause this year. So we [...]


Quit Smoking for Good

We all know people who claim that ‘quitting smoking is easy.’ They typically say this as they are puffing on a cigarette. Sure — it’s easy to quit for an hour or a day. But it is the “quit smoking for good” part which is difficult.
Your Health is the Best Reason to Give Up Smoking [...]


Some metabolic diseases

There are some metabolic diseases we can do something about: PKU and a low phenylalanine, low-protein diets. You give them just enough proteins so that these patients can grow. Homocystinuria: we used to decrease their protein restriction a little bit but now betaine has sort of taken care of all of that, and we usually [...]


How do we treat urea cycle disorders

How do we treat urea cycle disorders, without going through all five of them? Three key points. First of all, we need to prevent protein catabolism because these infants, if they don’t get enough calories they break down their own muscle protein, and in the process of doing that generate more ammonia. That’s the last [...]


So let’s look at the common tests

So let’s look at the common tests because you may have some clues there as to what might be going on. For example, you can look at a CBC. If the child has neutropenia or thrombocytopenia this might be a clue that the child has methylmalonic aciduria, or propionic aciduria. If the child is spilling [...]


Homocystinuria. New Treatments for Biochemical Disorders

Homocystinuria is very uncommon, compared to PKU, and the screening test in those states that do it is not to measure homocystine, because it’s a little difficult – because it’s an unstable compound – they actually measure methionine. The diagnostic test is to do a complete plasma amino acid profile. I’ll stress again, nobody gets [...]


Biochemical Disorders

Biochemical disorders are caused by genetically determined defects, usually in an enzyme, although sometimes they are in receptors or other parts of the pathway. Unfortunately sometimes the body makes toxic substances. In the case of PKU, the body makes phenylactate and phenylpyruvate, which are neurotoxins. So it has decreased phenylalanine a little bit but it [...]