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At least monkeys now have an excuse for menopause weight gain. Maybe humans do to?
Menopause Equals Extra Munching, Study Shows
By Maggie Fox, November 12, 2003
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a possible explanation of why many women gain weight after menopause, a U.S. researcher said on Wednesday that monkeys whose ovaries are removed eat 67 percent more food and gain 5 percent of body weight in just weeks.
Reporting to a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans, Judy Cameron said she may be able to help explain why so many women begin to gain weight as they go through menopause, even though many try not to.
"When women go through the menopause, they gain weight. But there are also lifestyle changes," Cameron said in a telephone interview. Monkeys provide a great model because they have 28-day menstrual cycles like humans and also go through menopause, she said.
Her team removed the ovaries of 19 out of 47 monkeys at Oregon Health & Science University. "In the first two months, they had a 67 percent increase in food intake. These animals are chubby," she said.
Mysteriously, some of the monkeys were able to eat much more without gaining much more weight, while others gained large amounts of weight. "There was very little correlation between what the animals were eating and how much weight they gained," she said.
Here was the perfect opportunity to test an idea that dieting women have heard for years -- that eating at night puts more weight on than daytime eating. "Some monkeys eat only daytime meals, she said. "Some get 60 percent of their calories by snacking at night."
That made no difference. "Nighttime eaters were not any more likely to gain weight, she said.
Cameron's team is testing the metabolisms of the monkeys to see if the lack of estrogen affected that. "People ask, 'So what?"' she said. "You need to be aware that as you go through menopause, there is going to be a growing desire for food."
Menopausal women can watch what they eat and exercise more, she said.
And now the story so many of my patients have been waiting for -- finally . . . the Male Contraceptive:
Male Contraceptive Demonstrates Efficacy and Safety
Mindy Hung
Nov. 5, 2003 — An injection of androgen and progestin demonstrates high contraceptive efficacy in men, according to results of a study published in the October issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. The male contraceptive also showed satisfactory short-term safety and recovery of spermatogenesis.
"It demonstrates high contraceptive efficacy compared with the benchmarks of condoms, the existing reversible male method, and oral contraception, the major reversible female contraceptive method, which have first year failure rates of approximately 12% and 3%, respectively," write Leo Turner and colleagues from the ANZAC Research Institute in Australia.
Investigators studied 55 men aged 18 to 50 years, who were in a stable relationship with a female partner for one or more years and who did not seek pregnancy for at least 12 months. Subjects had to be in good general health and have normal reproductive function.
No pregnancies occurred in 426 person-months (35.5 person-years; 95% confidence limits for contraceptive failure rate, 0% - 8%/year) of efficacy exposure among 51 men. Sperm density fell rapidly among the majority of subjects: 94% of men entered the efficacy phase by three months; 2 (3.6%) of 55 men were not sufficiently suppressed to enter the efficacy phase.
All men recovered completely after treatment (median, 3.6 months to sperm reappearance and 5.0 months to 20 million sperm/mL) except one patient with an incidental testicular disorder. Four men seeking fertility achieved paternity after completion of the study.
J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2003;88:4659-4667
As a follow-up to last week's email, you can now access the complete Wall Street Journal article on hormone therapy and the WHI study. It's the best analysis I've seen of this very controversial research.
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