Genes give clue to early puberty

At least 30 genes appear to play a role in the age at which girls reach puberty, according to an international group of scientists.

The team scanned the genetic code of more than 100,000 women, reporting their findings in the journal Nature Genetics.

In the UK, girls as young as 10 are now showing the first signs of puberty.

A specialist said early puberty was linked to an increased risk of female cancers later in life.
The reasons why girls are going through puberty several years earlier than a century ago are not well understood by scientists.

Some have suggested a relationship between early puberty and obesity, and the latest research, carried out by the Reprogen consortium of scientists from the US, Europe and Australia, supports this idea.
Among the 30 genes highlighted by their genome research were some already linked to fat metabolism and weight regulation.

However, it is still not clear whether being obese or overweight in childhood is itself the cause of early puberty, or just another consequence of a different mechanism.

In addition, the study does not show how much of the risk is due to genes, and how much other environmental factors such as diet and upbringing are responsible.

Fat stores

One author, Dr Ken Ong, from the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit in Cambridge, said: "We know that girls who are overweight are more likely to go through puberty at young ages.
You need to be aware that you may be laying down your future risk from childhood”
Professor Anthony Swerdlow,Institute of Cancer Research

"If rates of childhood obesity continue to rise we will see many more girls with puberty at young ages."
Dr Anna Murray, another of the researchers from Exeter University, suggested that holding larger stores of fat might signal to the brain that it had the resources to start a woman's reproductive life.

She said: "We found that the timing of puberty is related to fatty acid metabolic pathways - there is evidence that the brain can sense these types of body fats."
Aside from the confusion experienced by young children entering puberty, it carries other health risks in the longer term.

Professor Anthony Swerdlow, from the Institute of Cancer Research, said that early puberty meant a higher risk of female cancers, particularly breast cancer.
This was possibly due to a higher lifetime exposure to sex hormones such as oestrogen.

He said that good diet and exercise, or the lack of it, in early childhood might be crucial to health many decades later.
He said: "What we increasingly believe is that, at least for breast cancer, the risk starts very, very young, even before puberty.

"If you are to prevent it, you need to be aware that you may be laying down your future risk from childhood."

 Can men get breast cancer?

Although rare, men can get and even die from breast cancer. While the risk is much lower for men than for women, each year 1 in 100 breast cancer patients is male. 

source: komen.org

Woman Pregnant With 2 Babies, But They're Not Twins

A Utah woman is pregnant with two babies — who aren’t twins — thanks to a rare condition that causes her to have two uteruses, KSL.com reported.

Angie Cromar’s doctors were shocked when her first ultrasound revealed two babies at slightly different stages of development.

"[He said] I'm five weeks and four days in one, and six weeks and one day in the other," Cromar said.
Cromar knew she was born with a rare condition called didelphys, meaning she had two uteruses, but the chances of conceiving in both at the same time are 1 in 5 million, according to the report.

In a female fetus, the uterus starts out as two small tubes. As the fetus develops, the tubes normally join to create one larger, hollow organ — the uterus. Sometimes, however, the tubes don't join completely, and each one develops into a separate cavity, the Mayo Clinic said on its website.

"Probably less than 100, so far, worldwide, have been reported; so she's a member of a small, elite club," Dr. Steve Terry, Cromar’s ob-gyn in Murray, Utah said of her condition.

Cromar’s husband couldn’t believe the news either.

"It was exciting. He didn't believe me for a little while, though," she said.

Although the rare condition hasn’t affected her other pregnancies, Cromar, a labor and delivery nurse, knows that her condition presents certain risks, including pre-term labor and low birth weight.

“Sometimes, these are considered high-risk pregnancies,” Dr. Manny Alvarez, senior managing health editor of Foxnews.com and chairman of ob-gyn at Hackensack University Medical Center in Hackensack, N.J. said.

Alvarez, who specializes in high-risk pregnancies, told FoxNews.com that didelphys is classified as a mullerian deformity. He added that a normal uterus looks like a pair, but this kind of defect sometimes causes both uteruses to have a heart shape.

"Oh, I'm a little nervous, just because I know what can happen, but I'm really excited," Cromar said.

Autism Study: Baby's Babble May Contain Vital Clues

To a parent's ears, there's nothing more enchanting than the babble of a child learning to talk. Now research shows that those nonsense syllables could contain coded signals that a toddler is autistic.

In a study released today, scientists report that they have designed a computer program that can distinguish between the speech of normal children and those with autism. Even though the work is only a first stab at analyzing audio recordings for signs of autism, it can correctly identify more than 85 percent of autistic and nonautistic children.

"We had no idea that this was possible," Kim Oller of the University of Memphis, head of the research team behind the study, told AOL News. "It's very surprising that you can use a totally objective system and get this much information so quickly."

The finding could eventually help doctors diagnose autism early in a child's life. Early diagnosis is crucial, because the earlier autistic children start intensive therapy, the more they improve.

If the computer program proves itself, "it would be very helpful to have an automated way to screen for autism," said Geraldine Dawson, a top autism researcher and the chief scientific officer for Autism Speaks, a science and advocacy group.

Autism is an often-devastating disorder that is being diagnosed in a growing number of children. One in 110 kids in the United States has autism or a related disorder, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Children with full-blown autism have trouble communicating and relating to others. Many autistic kids, even as babies, avoid making eye contact. They may flap their hands and obsessively line up their toys rather than playing with them.

Scientists have known for decades that autistic children show early problems in their speech, but there's tremendous variety in how such toddlers distort their babbling, Oller said. That has made it difficult to use speech problems to help diagnose autism.

Oller and his colleagues tucked miniature voice recorders -- each roughly the weight of a candy bar -- into the chest pockets of more than 200 children ages 10 months to 4 years. The team then recorded everything that came out of the kids' mouths over six to eight days, for roughly 12 hours each day. The computer software filtered out crying, sneezes and coughs and focused on the sounds that resembled syllables.

All children mangle their syllables while learning to talk. But the scientists discovered that autistic children tended to do so far longer than normal children, making it easy for the software to pick out the autistic kids' voices.

The current gold standard for diagnosing autism is a long observation session by a medical specialist who watches a child and tallies up activities characteristic of autism.

The computer program "is the first kind of system that's totally objective," Oller said. "I don't know of any other system that doesn't involve judgments being made by people."

He doesn't think his program alone, even when perfected, should be used to declare that a child is autistic. But audio analysis "could be used very effectively" as a tool for screening children whose parents are worried about their development, he said.

Dawson agrees, saying automated voice analysis could help "improve our ability to identify infants who are at risk." Such a tool could also be useful in countries where autism specialists are in short supply, she said.

The study is being published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Several of the authors were paid consultants to a for-profit company that developed the recorder and computer program. The company was turned into a nonprofit foundation in 2009. Oller said the consulting fees had no influence on his research and that he stopped accepting them when he decided to write this paper.

Scientists say vaginal gel cuts HIV-infections by half

An easy-to-use microbicidal gel proven to significantly reduce the risk of HIV infection would be a very important breakthrough in the fight to control the spread of HIV/Aids.

The best way to minimise the risk of infection during sex is to use a condom - but this is not an option for many women around the world who find it difficult to insist that a man take the necessary precautions.

As a result, women have become particularly vulnerable to infection in recent years and in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the Aids pandemic is most severe, they make up nearly 60% of those who are infected with the virus.

To compound the problem, science has shown that women are biologically more at risk of infection than men.

An effective gel would finally give women the chance to do something to protect themselves from infection - to take control of their own sexual health.

However, several earlier trials have produced disappointing results, and even the results of the latest trial - impressive though they are - underline that a gel is far from a fail-safe form of protection.

The latest results also need to replicated in a much bigger trial.

But provided a gel could be made widely accessible to women in some of the world's poorest countries, where it is needed the most, it could help to transform many lives for the better.