Pill can make women 'overly jealous, possessive'

Sunday, 20 October 2013

Islamabad, Oct 21 (Newswire): The next time you see your woman acting overly jealous or possessive, you might want to take a peek into her medicine cabinet, for it might be the Pill to blame.

A study by Stirling University's Dr Craig Roberts claims sex hormones in the contraceptive Pill bring out the green-eyed monster, making a woman more possessive and more likely to fret about her husband or boyfriend's fidelity.

The drug is also credited with making women broody, changing their taste in men and even boosting intelligence.

Progesterone, however, was not implicated in jealousy, suggesting that progesterone-only versions of the Pill play less havoc with women's emotions.

"It seems that women, and perhaps pharmaceutical providers, are not fully aware of the range of potential psychological side-effects associated with pill use and more specifically brand choice", Roberts said.

Other studies have suggested that the Pill makes certain areas of women's brains bigger, makes women broody and may also alter a sense of smell.

The study is published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

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Food allergies likely to afflict autumn babies

Islamabad, Oct 21 (Newswire): Babies born in autumn are at a higher risk of developing food allergies, a new study says.

Those born in October and November are almost twice as likely to show a form of food intolerance by four years, than those born in June and July.

Some 9.5 percent of autumn babies had an allergic response compared to five percent of summer babies, says a Finnish study.

Autumn babies were three times as likely to have an allergy to milk and eggs as summer babies.

The researchers believe the variation is due to the foetus's exposure to pollen at a critical time during pregnancy, according to the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

At around the end of the third month the foetus begins to produce antibodies.

Pollen appears to trigger the development of a type of antibody known as immunoglobin E, which is well known to be linked to food allergies, according to the study authors.

Kaisa Pyrhönen, of the Institute of Health Sciences at the University of Oulu in Finland, wrote: "Children having their early gestational period in the pollen season for broad-leafed trees are more prone to sensitisation to food allergies than other children."

Exactly why pollen exposure appears to trigger immunoglobin E remains unknown.

The study looked at 5,920 children born in one region of Finland between April 2001 and March 2006, of which 961 had been tested for food allergies.

Previous research has shown that babies born in autumn or winter are more prone to eczema and wheezing, identified by higher levels of circulating antibodies to allergies in their blood than those born in spring or summer.

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Testosterone protects against heart disease

Islamabad, Oct 21 (Newswire): Aggressive men with higher testosterone levels are less likely to die of heart disease, says a new study.

Medical scientists who followed 930 men diagnosed with coronary heart disease found that those with low testosterone were almost twice as likely to die over a seven-year period, than those with normal levels of the hormone.

The study, led by Professor Kevin Channer of Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield, adds weight to recent research overturning the widely-held belief that testosterone increases heart disease risk.

During the monitoring period one in five of those with low testosterone levels died, compared to one in eight (12 percent) of those with normal levels.

Even having what the researchers described as 'borderline' low levels of testosterone raised the risk of an early death, both from heart disease and other causes, according to the journal Online First Heart.

Previous studies have shown that healthy men with low testosterone are more likely to die before those with normal levels.

This study, published on Wednesday, shows a similar effect in those already diagnosed with heart disease.

Channer, a cardiologist, said testosterone was struggling to overcome an image problem caused by the mistaken belief that it caused health problems.

He said there were no studies that showed normal, physiological levels of the hormone were harmful.

The mistaken belief that it was harmful was based on studies of "testosterone abuse" among athletes, who had injected "industrial quantities" of it, giving themselves levels more than 100 times what the body produced.

Theirs was the fourth study showing testosterone's protective properties at normal levels, he added.

Prescription of replacement testosterone for men with low levels, who also have Type-2 diabetes or heart disease, has risen markedly in recent years.

"If it can be shown beyond reasonable doubt that mortality is reduced by replacement testosterone to physiological levels, then it should be given to all men with low levels," Channer argued.

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