Blame the Hormones

(ANNALS OF INTERNAL MEDICINE) 5 August 2008

For men over the age of 75, prostate screening can do more harm than good. This is according to the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF). They are recommending that doctors NOT screen for prostate cancer in their patients over 75 years old.

This is because prostate cancer tumors grow slowly in most cases. If a man is already 75 years or older and enjoying a vigorous life, he may die of another cause before the prostate cancer becomes an issue. However, if he is found to have cancer, his quality of life in his last years may be diminished by the cancer treatments.

( WSRZ.COM) 14 July 2008

Authorities in North Carolina are examining the deaths of four men who were once married to 76-year-old Betty Neumar. Betty Neumar has actually had five husbands die on her, but they are only investigating four.  She’s currently being accused of hiring a hit man to kill her fourth husband, so authorities decided it would be a good idea to re-examine the deaths of her other husbands as well as her first child.

Neumar’s grandson got suspicious when she wanted to buy a life insurance policy on him with her as the beneficiary.  Al Gentry, one of the dead husbands’ brothers said of Neumar, “You can’t trust her. You can’t believe a word she says.”

(Reuters) 3 July 2008:

One of the archetypes of old age is the image of the mad old woman: not that we use that loaded description any more, using instead dementia. Recent studies show that, as with so many stereotypes, there is some truth in the matter.

Amongst those over 90 28 % of the men had dementia of one form or another and 45% of the women did.

Quite why this divide between the sexes is unknown: the researchers have two thoughts on the matter, but neither are proven. The first is that women live longer after a diagnosis of dementia, raising their relative numbers. The second is that so few men live beyond 90 that those who do have to be considered “hardy survivors” and simply less likely to get anything.

A question that clearly requires further research.

(Alternet) 3 July 2008:

Up to 67% of women frequently experience sleep problems but there’s not a great deal being done about it. For 75% of all the research upon sleep has been done upon male subjects.

When women are indeed studied directly the problems turn out to be much less psychological, the manner in which they are usually treated, and more physically or hormonally based. Certainly, the surges of estrogen during the monthly cycle make women more susceptible to the influences of cortisol, the main stress reaction hormone.

The real import of the story is that while we do indeed need to treat men and women equally, that means having to take account of, as in this medical sense, the occasions when they are in fact different.

(AFP) 27 June 2008:

The Bulgarian Olympic Weightlifting team might not be where one would go to find gender equality on a normal day. And it’s true that the men and women compete separately, lifting different weights. It’s also true that the women compete against women from other countries, men against men.

However, there is one area in which they do share complete gender equality, even if this might not be something to be all that proud of. All of the applicants to this summer’s Olympic Games have been rejected, for all of them, each and every man and woman, were found to be taking banned anabolic steroids.

Still equality is a good thing, right’

(US News) 26 June 2008:

No, skin cancer isn’t one of those things you can get from sex: well, not unless you’re doing it outside a lot without sunscreren. However, there are major differences in the way that men and women suffer from the disease.

Men both get more cases of the various types of skin cancer and also are more likely to die of it if they get it. There is some evidence that male skin is simply more likely to become cancerous, but the major reasons seem to be twofold. The first is that men work outside more and thus gain more exposure, the second that they use much less sunscreen than women.

Another way of putting that last is that women simply pay more attention to the state of their skin overall: although might that change with the rise of metrosexuality?

(SUN-SENTINEL) 25 June 2008:

We’ve all had our little spats with our significant others while they are behind the wheel, but the one that happened in Florida last week between two young lovers got a little out of hand when Marquita Cherrell Armstrong jumped out of a car driven by Jeffery Dawayne Watson. The problem is that they were traveling on a busy Tallahassee interstate. Not surprisingly, Armstrong sustained serious injuries.  But at least she proved her point.  And had the last word no doubt.

(DETROIT FREE PRESS) 22 June 2008:

Well, that’s the headline, although that’s not quite what they mean: the ratio of marriage ceremonies to married couples is still pretty much one to one for both lesbians and gays. What they mean is that women in a committed relationship are more likely to marry than gay men in committed relationships.

Which shouldn’t come as all that much of a surprise: we see in heterosexual relationhips that women are more eager to marry than men.

It’s compounded here by the way that lesbian couples are much more likely to have and raise children than gays are (there’s the comparable ease and difficulty of the basic mechanics to consider along with desires), so much so that in states where there is a mechanism to register same sex partnerships (marriages, civil partnerships, whatever) the ration is usually 2:1, lesbian to gay.

An old English euphemism for “gay” was “not the marrying kind”: interesting how that seems still to be true, long past the time that the eupehimism is still in use.

(INDEPENDENT) 19 June 2008:

…well, not quite. In Ireland these days there’s still a gender imbalance in how much of it is done by women and how much is done by men. Women are working on average nearly forty minutes more each day than men (this is including both paid work and work in the home).

Compare that to the cousins over the Irish Sea, the British, where total work is the same for each sex.

In both countries women do more of the houosehold work, men more of the paid outside the home. But in the total amount done the Irish are currently about where the Brits were thirty years ago, which sounds about right. While Ireland has advanced greatly economically in recent years, socially it’s still a conservative place. Divorce was only legalized a few years ago and abortion is still illegal. That there’s still no gender parity in working hours shouldn’t be all that much of a surprise.

(JERUSALEM POST) 18 June 2008:

Brandeis University has released results that are concerninig Jewish leaders. Among the Non-Orthodox Jews, the men are becoming more distanced from the religion than their female contemporaries. The worry comes from the well known point that only those minorities closely identified with their religion are successful in passing that religion (and possibly sense of being a part of that minority) on to their children.

It has to be said though, there’s something a little odd about the concern. For the definition of a Jew in the next generation is one who is born to a female Jew of this generation: the status of the father, their religion, makes no difference in law or custom to the Jewishness of the child. So we’d rather expect the women to be more closely connected with both the religious and cultural aspects, wouldn’t we?