Interesting Information On Women's Health

I just read a fascinating article first published in The New Yorker in March 2000 and reproduced in Malcolm Gladwell's latest book titled "What the Dog Saw". The article is called "John Rock's Error" and the discussion begins with the birth control pill, of which John Rock was the inventor. His error was that he thought the Catholic church would see it as a "natural" means of birth control since it mimics the body's natural chemistry and they would therefore condone it - Whoops.

Interesting, but not what really caught my attention. Did you know that "Up until the beginning of the nineteenth century, women of childbearing age rarely menstruated"? It makes sense, but I guess I never thought about it. Women were either pregnant or lactating - and I always felt glad I didn't have to live that life. But I never considered that might be what our bodies were designed for. What we think of as normal - frequent menses - is in evolutionary terms abnormal. And we are at a much greater risk of certain kinds of cancer because our lifestyles have changed away from that earlier "normal".

Cancer occurs when certain types of errors are introduced as cells divide. This means that any change promoting frequent cell division has the potential to increase cancer risk. And that includes ovulation, where an egg literally bursts through the ovary wall, causing the cells of the ovary to divide to heal the wound. It has been shown that each time a woman bears a child, her lifetime risk of ovarian cancer drops by 10 percent. Could this be because she stops ovulating during the pregnancy and even longer if she is breast-feeding, saving her ovaries from that excessive cell division for a year or more? And this goes for endometrial cancer as well. When a woman is ovulating, the uterine lining grows in a flurry of cell division, only to be sloughed off during menstruation if she doesn't become pregnant. "Ovarian and endometrial cancer are characteristically modern diseases, consequences, in part, of a century in which women have come to menstruate four hundred times in a lifetime." As opposed to the approximately 100 times for a healthy woman in earlier times.

The article goes on to discuss ongoing work on new birth-control measures that would reduce the number of times a women would ovulate and menstruate in a year. Sounds like a good plan.