Archive for December, 2007

“Dysmenorrheal” is the medical term of menstrual cramp or pain caused during menstrual period.

Being a woman, you must have heard about this or even experienced this.

Nearly every woman experiences these cramps at least once in her life. There is no specific age limit for these cramps.

These cramps range from slight discomfort, interfering daily with routine and severely annoying.

Categorization of the cramps:

• Primary Dysmenorrheal(cramps)
• Secondary Dysmenorrheal (cramps)

Primary cramps are often seen in young girls who have just started their menstruation cycle. Pain is felt in the lower abdomen, back and some times even in thighs.

Pains start shortly before the onset of the periods and last for three to five days. These cramps become less severe in your mid-twenties or even stop when you give birth to a child.

Secondary cramp is the pain caused due to the disorder in reproductive organs such as fibroid tumors, pelvic adhesions, endometriosis and ovarian cysts. It usually begins in early stage of menstrual cycle and last longer than regular menstrual cramps.

Reasons for the cramps:

For primary cramps, the cause of pain is exactly unknown, but it can be caused due to the below reasons:

Menopause is the stage in your life when you won’t get your periods.

This is because your ovaries stop releasing eggs for fertilization and eventually your menstrual cycle also stops.

Hot flashes are considered as one of the main symptoms of menopause.

During menopause, your body produces fewer amounts of progesterone and estrogens which results to thermostat in your brain that means brain gets mixed signals.

Is it cold or hot? Your brain will oscillate between these two states.

Due to these oscillations, the blood vessels contracts and expands in an unpredictable way. As a result, there will be an increase in the flow of blood which leads to a feeling of warmth on the face, then to neck and then slowly up to chest.

How warmer a menopause hot flash will be?

Hot flashes vary from woman to woman, for some of you it can be mild and moderate and for the others it can be severe. Around 10-15% of women suffer from severe hot flashes. Recent study has provided that 50-70%of women taking tamofoxin usually suffer from menopause hot flashes.

Hot flashes are common if you have reached menopause state at early stages and also for the women suffering from breast cancer.

The most serious of all types of hepatitis is the hepatitis C.

Today, Hepatitis C virus (HCV) has become one of the most common reasons for liver transplantation in adults.

Nowadays, around 300 millions of the world’ s population is suffering from HCV.

The rate of HCV affected people in eastern part of Europe is very high when compared with HCV affected people in the western part of the continent.

It is estimated that currently approximately 4.1 millions of people, in United States, are infected with hepatitis C. Among these, 3.2 million are chronically infected.

Mostly, it spreads through sharing drug equipments (needles), unprotected sex with an infected partner, blood transfusions, from mother to child during pregnancy.

You, as a woman, could also get HCV through a tattoo or body piercing with unsterilized and dirty tools.

Most of the specialists consider this disease to be an epidemic. As Hepatitis C is mostly asymptomatic, it is generally known as a silent illness. You, having hepatitis C, will not aware of its presence in your body for many years.

Although HCV damages your liver, you do not develop symptoms with this disease. If you develop any, they would be mild and usually come and go for some period of time.

PID is the term that you should have come across generally in the discussion of sexual transmitted diseases.

PID is short for Pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), which is an infection of woman’s reproductive organs.

It is estimated that nearly one million women are affecting with PID every year.

You can get infected with pelvic inflammatory disease through several different organisms, but the most commonly involved bacteria for the cause of pelvic inflammatory disease are neisseria gonorrhoeae and chlamydia trachomatis.

When this bacterium migrates from your vagina to your uterus and upper genital tract, then infection occurs to genital area and you will acquire pelvic inflammatory disease.

Pelvic inflammatory disease can injure the fallopian tubes and tissues in and near the uterus and ovaries.

Thus, the bacteria infects the fallopian tubes and cause inflammation. PID when left undiagnosed and untreated can cause very serious consequences such as infertility, ectopic pregnancy, and chronic pelvic pain.

The longer you leave the pelvic inflammatory disease without treatment, the higher your risk of experiencing health complications. So, if you experience any of these complications then it is important to seek treatment immediately.

Hepatitis refers to an inflammation of the liver due to some specific viruses. It is generally known as viral hepatitis.

It is also found that bacteria can also cause hepatitis. The viruses that attack the liver are of five types: hepatitis A, B, C, D and hepatitis E.

All these hepatitis virus types are very serious and can damage the liver to great extent. These viruses can spread easily from person to person in several different ways.

The hepatitis symptoms may vary depending on the type of hepatitis virus present in your body and the extent of the liver damage. However, some of the hepatitis symptoms are identical in all hepatitis virus types.

Hepatitis is itself a hepatitis symptom. Hepa means liver and itis means inflammation. So, inflammation of the liver is the first hepatitis symptom indicating the occurrence of hepatitis. The beginning of the hepatitis in the body is the initial stage.

There are several different hepatitis stages and each has their own hepatitis symptoms.

After this stage, the hepatitis will be in acute phase.

With acute hepatitis, you may experience hepatitis symptoms such as fever, muscle or joint pains, nausea, vomiting, dehydration, headache, loss of appetite, abdominal pain, diarrhea, and fatigue.

HPV stands for Human Papilloma Virus. It is a viral infection that cause sexually transmitted disease - Genital Warts.

You have no cure for HPV infection. Often the infection in your body disappears on its own.

If it does not, you have many HPV treatment options available to treat the symptoms caused by the human papilloma virus [HPV Symptoms].

With HPV, you may exhibit no symptoms but if any symptom develops, it may be itching, burning, or tenderness around the infected area, pain during sex or urination, chancre sores on the genital area and many more.

You have 80% chances of getting infected with HPV at some point throughout your life. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), it is estimated that approximately 6.2 million HPV infection new cases are raising yearly.

Human papilloma virus is a flat and thin cell that resides on the surface of the skin, vagina, anus, cervix, mouth, and throat. More than hundred kinds of HPV exist. Each HPV virus can be identified with specific number or type. Approximately 30 HPV types spread through sexual contact.

Contraception is nothing but birth control. It prevents the occurrence of pregnancy after sexual intercourse.

You can prevent pregnancy through several different contraceptive methods.

However, choosing the right contraception method depends on various factors: your overall physical condition, regularity of sexual intercourse, the effectiveness of the contraception method, its side effects and your comfortness in using the method.

Before gaining knowledge about contraception, it is better to understand how do you get pregnancy!

The occurrence of pregnancy is totally based on menstrual cycle and ovulation process. Every month, your body starts ovulation fourteen days before the arrival of your menses.

The ovulation process occurs when one of your ovaries releases egg or ovum. Ovaries are a pair of female reproductive organs that resides on either sides of the uterus.

This ovum then passes into the fallopian tube and becomes ready for fertilization. The endometrium (uterus lining) will become thicker for the fertilization of the egg.

If the egg doesn’t get fertilized, the endometrium and the blood will become shed and passes out through vagina during your monthly periods, also called menses.

HIV stands for Human Immunodeficiency Virus. It is a sexually transmitted disease that is caused by RNA retroviruses: HIV-1 and HIV-2.

It is also known as silent infection because the HIV Symptoms are asymptomatic in the initial stages (also known as latent phase).

Sexually transmitted diseases are the diseases that can spread easily through a sexual intercourse with an infected person, from mother to child during pregnancy and during breast-feeding.

The other sexually transmitted diseases are gonorrhea, genital warts, syphilis, and pelvic inflammatory diseases.

It is found that, in the United States, approximately forty thousand new HIV infection cases develop yearly and about half of the adults suffering with HIV virus are women.

When you first get infected with HIV virus, it initially affects the T-Cell (a type of white blood cell) and multiplies the T-cells to produce several copies of it. Thus, the virus can spread easily.

In this initial stage of infection, you may develop no or very few HIV symptoms. So, if you develop early HIV symptoms then it occurs within six to twelve weeks after you get infected with HIV virus.