Tag Archives: forest

Fertility preservation option for young boys with cancer

The research, conducted by the Medical Center’s Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) under the direction of Anthony Atala, M.D., institute director, gives boys who have a high risk of becoming sterile the option to “bank” a small piece of testicular tissue prior to treatment. “The average survival rates for childhood cancer are around 80 percent, but a side effect of some treatments can be permanent sterility,” said Thomas W. McLean, M.D., a pediatric cancer specialist, who co-leads the experimental biological bank with Hooman Sadri-Ardekani, M.D., Ph.D., a male infertility specialist at WFIRM. …

Medicine looking deeper into vital differences between women, men

That’s hardly an earth-shattering observation, but the fact is that, aside from the most obvious physical differences between the sexes, medicine has traditionally treated women as if they were merely smaller men. “When we look closely, we tend to find differences” between men and women, said Sarah L. Berga, M.D., professor and chair of obstetrics and gynecology and vice president for women’s health services at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. “But for most of the past, we never looked.” That started to change in the late 1980s, when physicians and researchers recognized that women’s health encompassed more than those conditions unique to females; that women’s experiences with gender-common conditions and the treatments for them often differed significantly from those of men…

Lacking trust in one’s doctor affects health of emotionally vulnerable cancer patients

Patients who feel anxious and uneasy with their doctor may be impacted the most. “Anxiously attached patients may experience and report more physical and emotional problems when the relationship with their physician is perceived as less trusting,” said Chris Hinnen, Ph.D., lead author and clinical psychologist at Slotervaart Hospital in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The researchers acknowledge that the issue of trust between patients and their doctors can be complicated, but observe that it’s important to understand fears of rejection and abandonment that often exist in anxiously attached patients. Hinnen and his colleagues analyzed questionnaire responses from 119 participants with breast, cervical, intestinal or prostate cancers at 3, 9 and 15 months after their diagnosis. …

Cancer survivors in rural areas forgo health care because of cost

Data analysis showed cancer survivors in rural areas who were aged 65 or older were 66 percent more likely to forgo medical care and 54 percent more likely to forgo dental care because of cost, compared with their urban counterparts. "This is the first population-based study to examine whether cancer survivors in rural and urban areas are equally likely to forgo health care as a result of concerns about cost," said Nynikka Palmer, Dr.P.H., M.P.H., postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Social Sciences and Health Policy at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C. "We found a disparity among older survivors, for whom health insurance coverage through Medicare is almost universal, while no disparity was found for younger survivors after controlling for various factors. This suggests that health insurance coverage alone may not ensure equal access to health care…

What works for women doesn’t work for men

But unlike in women, neither soy protein nor a common antidepressant provides relief for men, according to researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. Hot flashes occur in approximately 80 percent of men who are undergoing hormone manipulation as treatment for prostate cancer. Hormone therapy reduces the levels of male hormones, called androgens, to prevent them from reaching prostate cancer cells and stimulating their growth. "Changing hormone levels cause hot flashes in both women and men, so we hoped that using soy supplements and/or an antidepressant would help reduce them in men as it does in many women," said Mara Vitolins, Dr…