Women's Health

Every woman dreads the terrible diagnosis of breast cancer, the leading cancer in women worldwide. Wanting to catch abnormal signs early, many women heed their doctors’ recommendations and get yearly mammograms. Depending on which doctor they see, however, patients...

This year alone, the American Cancer Society estimates that doctors will find over 300,000 new cases of breast cancer in the United States. When these doctors first diagnose breast cancer in women, the patients are often anxious about upcoming...

Menstruation is a healthy and normal part of being a woman. The arrival of one’s first period marks the change from girlhood to womanhood and is what makes it possible for women to become pregnant. However, today, more and more...

Our bodies are a stew of hormones and chemicals and enzymes and all sorts of exotic-sounding ingredients. For many women, this concoction bubbles along happily right through menopause. But for other women, it doesn't take a chemist to know...

Most women go through a battery of prenatal tests during the course of their pregnancy. But if you have diabetes, high blood pressure, or too much or too little of the fluid that bathes the fetus and serves as...

Why do I need to give myself a breast self examination? Finding a tumor before the cancer has spread to other parts of your body can mean the difference between life and death. Many breast cancers are first detected by...

Blood clots have been a known risk of oral contraceptives since the 1990s, but for most women, the chances seemed small enough to justify taking the Pill. Now, in a report published in The BMJ,scientists led by Yana Vinogradova,...

One of the most common types of ovarian cysts that we see in young women is the dermoid cyst. These cysts form from very early on, as the ovaries of a young girl begin to evolve. Dermoid cysts are...

Can a mammogram save my life? Mammograms -- X-ray pictures of the breasts -- are a valuable but imperfect tool for detecting breast cancer. The death rate from breast cancer has dropped dramatically in the last 20 or 30 years,...

How does breast cancer occur? Breast cells become cancerous when they mutate and start to multiply at an abnormally fast pace, crowding out healthy tissue. The abnormal cells grow into a dense mass that may be visible on a mammogram...