Archive for December, 2009

Happy New Year!

Hey everyone, this is gonna be a short and sweet one since we’re looking at the last day of the year and I know you all have celebration plans of some sort and I know that I do as well. Just wanted to take some time to wish you all a fun and happy New Year’s Eve, and a wonderful new year filled with hope, goals being achieved and fun!  Let’s make this a great year for women’s health, breast news and innovations in breast health and breast implant surgeries and everything breast related!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Herceptin and Tykerb Combo May Prove Effective

For women with advanced breast cancer, there may be some very good news on the horizon in extending their lives longer and perhaps helping to put them into remission, even when all hope seems lost.  But does it really improve their quality of life as well? To me that is the real question.  So  read more about this new super combo that has shown promise, the combination of two existing breast cancer drugs, one called Tykerb, one called Herceptin, both of which we have discussed here before, one, Tykerb, I think when it had just first come out, so I don’t even think that one has been on the market all that long.

Here’s the scoop, thus far, on the findings.  In a study involving 300 women with breast cancer in it’s advanced stages, the women who were receiving the Tykerb and Herceptin combo lived nearly five months longer than the women who did not receive this new drug combo. Does that mean that their quality of life was also better, or did it really improve the cancer? It doesn’t really say. Let’s hope so.  The real finding here too is that if it can help women with advanced breast cancer this much to extend their life span, then what can it do for women with less advanced forms of the cancer?

They are hoping that it really helps to improve odds for women who are in their earlier stages, so that is the next phase of experiments.  The specific job that Herceptin and Tykerb do inside the body of a breast cancer patient, is that they take aim at and destroy proteins called HER-2, which are found in abnormal abundance in the breast cancer patient.  By destroying these, they presumably increase the life span of the breast cancer patient who otherwise would not have that benefit.

The unique combination attacks the HER-2 cells from both the inside and outside of the cell, one drug doing the outside attack and the other drug doing the inside attack, a very comprehensive approach to destroying a main component of breast cancer reproduction.

This way, if one of them doesn’t work at cracking the inside, or alternatively, the outside of the cell, then the other one kicks in and at least delivers one of the two pronged fatal blows to the deadly cells.  Potential side effects of the drugs include severe diarrhea and potentially fatal blood clots, but if properly managed, these potential side effects I’m sure could be minimized. Plus, I’m sure that if I were faced with two options, I’d probably choose one that could potentially extend my life and maybe even save my life versus the risks it could have against my health. Heck, they sound better than chemo and radiation to me.

Good Morning and Merry Christmas!

Well ladies, I really do not have much to say today besides the fact that I wish every one of you a warm, safe, and merry Christmas and holiday season.  This is the time of year when we all count our blessings and look around at our precious family and friends and thank God that we have them in our lives.  I am so grateful for my life and the people I have in it, and this is a day where I like to remind myself to never take my blessings for granted.  And as for you, dear readers, thank you for making this a great year at Breast News Magazine. We hope we can serve you with the best news and information again in the coming year.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!

Breast Feeding’s Health Benefits?

There may be some health benefits to breast feeding for women that were not fully realized or appreciated before, which may also help women decide to breast feed a little more readily. First, there are the obvious drawbacks to breast feeding for the women who do choose to breast feed. First, it is a very large undertaking for women. You have to pump your breast milk out every few hours for a long time when you’re breast feeding, and this can obviously put a substantial dent in your life’s carefree ways.  You also have to worry about your breasts sagging after you breast feed.

This is one of the largest reasons that women, after breast feeding, decided to either under go breast enlargement surgery, or they look for breast implant alternatives to help them again fill out the “deflation” of their breasts that occurs when the breasts go back down to their normal size after their done feeding baby for that time.

Then, there are the obvious, and glaring benefits to breastfeeding. First, there is the biggest one, which is that your child gets an immense benefit from drinking your breast milk instead of formula. Some research has shown that children who are breast fed are not only much stronger and develop faster, but their brains may also benefit from this early boost to development, and there are the obvious benefits to their immune system since woman’s breast milk passes valuable antibodies over to the child – less antibodies for the child to have to produce on their own at that young age.

Now, women are also going to have another thing to consider when thinking about breast vs. bottle feeding.  They may have lower long term risks of both diabetes and heart health risks.  This is huge, because women who bottle feed showed a higher likelihood toward these types of diseases. It’s not clear whether this is directly linked to actual breast feeding or other lifestyle factors of these women, but it certainly is another reason to consider breast feeding your child.

Rachel Uchitel : Breast Implants?

I hate to jump on the ol’ Tiger Woods multiple mistresses scandal bandwagon, but here I go, because the ever growing list of his alleged mistresses over this married years has some interesting women in it, many of them who have enhanced assets that are pretty clear from the pictures shown of them in the tabloids, on the news and online.  One of them, perhaps now the most well known name because hers was the first to break an ever changing and evolving story, Rachel Uchitel.

Rachel Uchitel seems like a pretty intelligent woman actually. She has never come out and said straight out that she had an affair with Tiger, but it’s suspected that after she hired feminist lawyer Gloria Allred, she had made a deal to keep her mouth shut since she canceled a major new conference shortly before it was to air.  This may be a very savvy girl, and she may have saved more face than she realized by taking the path she did.

She is some sort of either a PR person for a club, or a “hostess” whatever that means, all the papers have different titles for her, but this woman seems like she has some sort of savvy in the business world and has carved out quite a living for herself by cozying up to the rich and famous, and looking like she’s having a flirtatiously good time doing it. I mean, have you seen the pictures with her playfully smooching at the camera and having a seductive look on her face?

Not so sure about that there Rachel, you may want to preserve a little dignity with those kinds of pics, sorry, it looks like you’re just trying to hard to be overtly sexy, and that never works. However, I will give this to you, you have a great boob job, and you have a kick butt body to go with it.

She has been photographed in a bikini, where her toned, lean body was seen with a suspiciously full pair of breasts – they look great, but my money’s on them being phony, just because the rest of her body seems to be virtually fat free.  Yeah, maybe I’m a little jealous!  At any rate, this whole Tiger Woods thing will be history once we latch on to the next latest and greatest story about celebrities screwing up.

Special Pricing on Some of Your Breast Faves

Wow, I can’t believe I’m up this early first of all, so top o’ the mornin’ to you!  I’m sitting here sipping my morning pumpkin spice coffee, and I’m carousing the web, as is customary for me first thing in the morning. I guess I’m somewhat of an internet addict if you can say that.  I’m one of those people who compulsively checks my cell phone (an iPhone, incidentally, the most web friendly cell phone in my opinion) for emails all day, and I have all the apps that I need at my fingertips such as Dictionary.com, Wikipedia and so on and so forth so that I have instant information whenever I need it. I’m a bit of an information nerd, I guess you could say.

Anyway, carousing through the information highway that is the internet, I noticed that there are quite a few nice sales going on for natural breast enhancement products right now.  They vary in their presentation, but most of them offer significant discounts off of their package, like the Bountiful Breast ad I put on the home page over there in the right hand upper corner if you want to check out their discounts, or they’re offering free bottles with purchases of certain packages. At any rate, I always see the most significant discounts around this time on all herbal products and also fun stuff.

What I mean by fun stuff is bras, jelly inserts and the like. Tis the season for holiday parties, so retailers are getting their little mits on the women who are going to those parties and need to look their breast – best I mean. Lots of women right now look for things like push up bras, strapless and backless bras, and generally gear that makes their boobs look fabulous.  Retailers like Victorias Secret take full advantage of that, as they should, and are offering some of the most high tech bras I’ve ever seen that promise to give you the best cleavage and ultra comfort.

They know that while you’re out shopping for your family, for example, you might just be enticed to stop in to that store in the mall to get some pretty girlie stuff to make you feel prettier and sexier, especially around this time when people tend to be eating a lot of bad foods and are gaining some weight, and usually working out less too.  We all need that boost from those sugar cookies and mashed potatoes and gravy!

Jenny McCarthy Talks About “Rotating” Breast Implants

First of all, I have to say that I’m a huge fan of Jenny McCarthy. Besides having a little bit of a girl crush on her in college because I thought that not only was she funny and self deprecating but also had a killer body that I had always aspired to, but she’s very open, and I admire her ability to say anything that’s on her mind. She’s kind of a dichotomy in Hollywood for a woman, because she’s hot, has a great body and looks the part, but when she opens her mouth you understand that she’s a real straight shooter (ugh, I hate that cliche, but I think this fits her to a T for some reason), that’s not afraid to speak her mind about things, and she seems really down to earth.

She has not let fame totally affect her.  She’s very open about her breast implants too. I think at one point I even heard her talk about how she gets Botox.  Love these stars that admit what they do to look great, and how empowered they are to share that information with us poor average Janes who think that they just always naturally look ageless and gorgeous and wonder why we don’t naturally look like that.

Recently, I read Jenny McCarthy talk about a few things that really made her even more likable to me.  One was how she shot up to 211 pounds during her pregnancy with her son, for whom she also have bravely educated people on autism for and fought for cures for it.  She admits that she felt awful and miserable, and how it took a lot of hard work, dieting and dedication to get that weight off, and how there is no magic bullet to get it off.  Again, she’s not sugar coating her struggles with things that all of us women struggle with, which in my book is totally cool.

She also talked about how she downsized her breast implants, and how we all have to rotate them out every ten years anyways, which is true. Breast implants are not lifetime devices as a lot of women may think, and you do have to replaced them roughly every ten years or so to reduce likelihood of rupture and other problems.  She decided to downsize when she went through her replacement because she said she couldn’t fit in normal dress sizes with the larger implants, and it made it a pain to have to take in dresses elsewhere every time when she bought clothes since she had to go so large around the chest area.  See breast implant alternatives for other options instead of implants.

I just love her honesty, it’s so refreshing!

Baby Suffocates Breast Feeding

This is probably the most unfortunate story I’ve ever heard related to breast feeding, although I doubt this is the fist time this has happened.  A mother riding a plane on a long trip apparently was nursing a 4 week old baby on her breast when she fell asleep. Apparently when she woke up, the infant had suffocated and was not responding. Although efforts were made to resuscitate the small infant, they were unsuccessful, and an attempt to administer emergency measures on the child after turning the plane around were also unsuccessful.

It was reported that a doctor was on board and tried to revive the baby with no luck.  In this unfortunate incident, my heart definitely goes out to the mother who must be devastated at her loss and inevitably what she probably feels is partly her role in the infant’s death. An autopsy report is pending, and they will investigate whether the child perhaps had any pre existing health conditions that may have contributed to it’s death.

It’s hard to imagine how a baby can be suffocated by a breast, so it does make me wonder whether the child did have some sort of other unknown health issue that contributed as a factor in it’s unfortunate death.  All I can think of is the poor family (the woman is of Egyptian descent) who is probably devastated right now and wondering why this has happened to them.  I wonder if they  will actually report on what the findings in the autopsy are or not, seeing as though stories like this seem to disappear from the news fairly quickly, while things like Tiger Wood’s strange car accident story will linger for weeks.

Breast Thermography an Alternative to Mammography

A newer technique in screening for breast cancer may soon be taking hold as a preferred method over the often uncomfortable mammogram.  It’s called the breast thermography.  How it works is it takes thermal image “photos” of your breasts from several different angles and with your body in several different positions to get the different parts of the breasts on the screen.

The thermal images are supposed to be able to detect higher heat areas, which may indicate abnormalities in the breast tissues, and can also detect cancer, instead of actually scanning it via mammography, which has been a  subject of debate as well since some say it’s not as accurate on denser breast tissue (which generally means younger breasts).

It is believed by advocates of breast thermography that this technique of scanning the breast tissue can detect abnormalities and precancerous conditions in the tissue years before a typical mammogram can. It does this, they say, by showing where there is more blood flow activity and therefore showing signs of trouble that may lead to cancer years in advance. Even so though, I wonder what a woman could really do about that knowing it, besides try to change her diet and lifestyle habits to be healthier and help prevent the cancer from forming. Nonetheless, this is a very intriguing newer way of detecting breast cancers.

Advocates also prefer the thermography scan over mammography because there is no radiation exposure at all, which in comparison to the mammogram makes it desirable to those who prefer to be “au naturelle”.  Sounds like it would be the right option for me then too!  I’m actually supposed to schedule a mammogram for myself in the next few weeks, at the suggestion of my doctor. Even though I’m only 35 years old, she believes I should start getting them now because I have a maternal aunt who had aggressive breast cancer and died from it.

However, you should note that there are still die hard doctors out there who do not recommend the thermography over the mammography yet. They say it has not been compared rigorously enough to the mammogram and that it’s not quite ready to really replace anything, although some day it might be ready for the spotlight, there still needs to be research done to prove that it catches cancers just as often.

Whatever your choice might be, it may be a little harder to find thermography than it is to find the traditional screening since it is still fairly new. I know one thing I wouldn’t miss, all that pulling, pressing and compressing – youch!

What’s With the New “Internal Bra”

Hmm, may us women soon have a replacement to the cumbersome cloth bra that we’re accustomed to slinging over our shoulder every morning before we go to our job, and (hopefully) abandoning on the weekends or when we are just going to be around the house vegging out?  Well, only if you’re willing to undergo an outpatient procedure and pay some money for the “internal bra” which is supposed to provide the same support that tradition outer bras do, but only it does it inside the body via gel inserts underneath the breast (the underwire of the bra) and above the breasts, between the top of the breasts and the shoulders (the straps of the internal bra).

I heard mention in the article I read as well that for some women who are just looking for extra lift and firmness, this could actually replace breast augmentation for them, and it would cost less and also be a less difficult procedure to recover from since it’s outpatient.  I couldn’t find the cost anywhere, but my guess would be this might land in the couple grand range since it is indeed still a surgery.  The internal bra is called the Cup and Up bra, and it’s expected to be a hit with women who are looking for extra lift but don’t want to enlarge their breasts artificially with breast enlargement surgery.

The internal bra is inserted via a few incisions that are about a centimeter wide, so the scarring would be minimal. The surgery is so far in Europe only, but if it is successful and catches on, you can bet  that we’ll pick it up overseas here in the US too eventually, although we do tend to be a bit behind on getting things like this approved by the FDA.

They believe this will also be a hit with younger women who have taken on a degree of sagging in their breasts after they have had children.  This is the perfect surgery for them, since it will not actually make their breasts bigger, and it is going to be a little cheaper, than plastic surgery.  The patient can go home and rest a few days, and then they can go back to work, so it does require some form of recovery like breast implants, only it probably results in a lot less trauma and soreness, would be my guess.

The Dr. who came up with the device and procedure thinks that this may become widely available in the next 18 months as long as trials go well and the endurance of the bra proves successful after one year, so who knows, this may become quite the fad.