Women's Health Archive

It's no secret that healthy living can reduce your risk for developing heart disease. But ever wonder how much it may help? Up to 92%, suggests a study published Jan. 6, 2015, in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. It evaluated health habits of 70,000 young and middle-aged women during a 20-year period. The habits included not smoking; exercising for at least 2.5 hours each week; watching TV for fewer than seven hours a week; consuming a diet rich in vegetables, legumes, and whole grains but low in red meat, refined grains, and sugar; consuming no more than one alcoholic drink daily; and having a body mass index in the normal range. Compared with women who had none of those habits, women with all six reduced their risk of developing heart disease by 92%. Why do those habits provide so much protection against heart disease? "Limiting TV watching frees up time for exercise, and the other activities are known to reduce blood pressure, LDL cholesterol, and blood sugar, which reduce the three major risk factors for heart disease—hypertension, high levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, and diabetes," says Dr. Randall Zusman, a cardiologist and Harvard Medical School associate professor. And even though the study involved young and middle-aged women, Dr. Zusman reminds us that it's never too late to adopt a healthy lifestyle.

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Q. There seems to be agreement that supplements are worthless in supporting good health. I've been taking a multivitamin for older women for many years. I also take a calcium supplement since I am lactose intolerant. Should I discontinue the multivitamin, the calcium, or both?

A. You are definitely right about the recent consensus that most supplements, and certainly multivitamins, provide very little, if any, benefit to our health. So yes, stop taking the multivitamin. A far more important strategy to maintain good health is eating a diet containing lots of vegetables, fruit, whole grains, unsaturated fats, and small amounts of protein. Our bodies were designed to absorb nutrients from food, and that continues to be the best way to get them in our systems.

Changes in the aging eye may alter your night vision, but a few strategies can help you take to the road with confidence.

If you're over 50, you may be wondering if you should restrict your driving to the daylight hours. You may have read that your night vision declines at this age, or you may have noticed a little difficulty seeing in dim light. You may find glare from headlights bothersome.

Long trips come with an increased risk of blood clots deep in the leg veins, which can have serious complications.

Few women realize how common pelvic prolapse is—and how easily treated. Here are five things you should know.

Two in three women over age 40 wake up at least once each night because of a full bladder, and nearly half make two or more nighttime trips to the bathroom. But only a quarter of women who get up to urinate during the night say they are bothered by having to do so.

That's the finding from a survey of more than 2,000 northern California women ages 40 and older. Factors that increased the likelihood that a woman woke at night to urinate included older age, past hysterectomy, hot flashes, and use of vaginal estrogen. However, the late-night bathroom breaks weren't caused by an overactive bladder or stress incontinence. The results were published in the January 2015 issue of the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Claiming to feel younger than your age isn't just whistling into the wind. It can also mean you have more years ahead than some of your former classmates. According to a report in the Dec. 15, 2014, issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, older people who felt three or more years younger than their chronological age had a lower death rate compared with those who felt their age or older.

Two researchers at University College London looked at the responses of about 6,500 men and women with an average age of 65 who answered the question, "How old do you feel you are?" About 70% reported that they felt three or more years younger than their years, while 25% felt close to their age, and 5% felt more than one year older than they were.

Keep hydrated, and empty your bladder often to stave off these risky infections.

You don't have to develop the stoop and "dowager's hump" that were once thought to be inevitable consequences of aging.

If you're over 50, the odds that you'll experience a major fracture because of osteoporosis are one in two. Although osteoporosis increases the risk of fractures in every bone of the body, the spinal bones (vertebrae) are particularly vulnerable. For women with osteoporosis, as little as a cough or a sudden movement can cause a compression fracture, creating pain and potential deformity.

Although research suggests that women over 70 with early-stage breast cancer can skip radiation treatment, nearly two-thirds of women in that age group continue to receive it, according to findings published online Dec. 2, 2014, by the journal Cancer.

Researchers from Duke University sought to determine whether evidence from a large, randomized clinical trial published in 2004 had influenced treatment for early breast cancer. That study showed that adding radiation therapy to surgery plus tamoxifen does not reduce five-year recurrence rates or prolong survival in older women with early-stage tumors.