UCLA STUDY ON FRIENDSHIP AMONG WOMEN

 

 

March 8 is International Women's Day!

 

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Melissa Kaplan's
Chronic Neuroimmune Diseases
Information on CFS, FM, MCS, Lyme Disease, Thyroid, and more... Last updated January 1, 2014         

An alternative to fight or flight

©2002 Gale Berkowitz

A landmark UCLA study suggests friendships between women are special. They shape who we are and who we are yet to be. They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage, and help us remember who we really are. By the way, they may do even more.       Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our friends can actually counteract the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us experience on a daily basis. A landmark UCLA study suggests that women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause us to make and maintain friendships with other women. It's a stunning find that has turned five decades of stress research---most of it on men---upside down. Until this study was published, scientists generally believed that when people experience stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that revs the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible, explains Laura Cousin Klein, Ph.D., now an Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University and one of the study's authors. It's an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by saber-toothed tigers. Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just fight or flight; In fact, says Dr. Klein, it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is release as part of the stress responses in a woman, it buffers the fight or flight response and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead. When she actually engages in this tending or befriending, studies suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect. This calming response does not occur in men, says Dr. Klein, because testosterone---which men produce in high levels when they're under stress---seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin. Estrogen, she adds, seems to enhance it. The discovery that women respond to stress differently than men was made in a classic "aha" moment shared by two women scientists who were talking one day in a lab at UCLA. There was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee, and bonded, says Dr. Klein. When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own. I commented one day to fellow researcher Shelley Taylor that nearly 90% of the stress research is on males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew instantly that we were onto something. The women cleared their schedules and started meeting with one scientist after another from various research specialties. Very quickly, Drs. Klein and Taylor discovered that by not including women in stress research, scientists had made a huge mistake: The fact that women respond to stress differently than men has significant implications for our health. It may take some time for new studies to reveal all the ways that oxytocin encourages us to care for children and hang out with other women, but the "tend and befriend" notion developed by Drs. Klein and Taylor may explain why women consistently outlive men. Study after study has found that social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol. There's no doubt, says Dr. Klein, that friends are helping us live longer. In one study, for example, researchers found that people who had no friends increased their risk of death over a 6-month period. In another study, those who had the most friends over a 9-year period cut their risk of death by more than 60%. Friends are also helping us live better. The famed Nurses' Health Study from Harvard Medical School found that the more friends women had, the less likely they were to develop physical impairments as they aged, and the more likely they were to be leading a joyful life. In fact, the results were so significant, the researchers concluded, that not having close friends or confidants was as detrimental to your health as smoking or carrying extra weight. And that's not all. When the researchers looked at how well the women functioned after the death of their spouse, they found that even in the face of this biggest stressor of all, those women who had a close friend and confidante were more likely to survive the experience without any new physical impairments or permanent loss of vitality. Those without friends were not always so fortunate. Yet if friends counter the stress that seems to swallow up so much of our life these days, if they keep us healthy and even add years to our life, why is it so hard to find time to be with them? That's a question that also troubles researcher Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D., co-author of Best Friends: The Pleasures and Perils of Girls' and Women's Friendships (Three Rivers Press, 1998). The following paragraph is, in my opinion, very, very true and something all women should be aware of and NOT put our female friends on the back burners. Every time we get overly busy with work and family, the first thing we do is let go of friendships with other women, explains Dr. Josselson. We push the m right to the back burner. That's really a mistake because women are such a source of strength to each other. We nurture one another. And we need to have unpressured space in which we can do the special kind of talk that women do when they're with other women. It's a very healing experience.   Taylor, S. E., Klein, L.C., Lewis, B. P., Gruenewald, T. L., Gurung, R. A. R., & Updegraff, J. A. Behaviorial Responses to Stress: Tend and Befriend, Not Fight or Flight" Psychol Rev, 107(3):41-429. (Full text of article in PDF format) Geary DC, Flinn MV. Sex differences in behavioral and hormonal response to social threat: commentary on Taylor et al. Psychol Rev 2002 Oct;109(4):745-50; discussion 751-3 Cousino Klein L, Corwin EJ. Seeing the unexpected: how sex differences in stress responses may provide a new perspective on the manifestation of psychiatric disorders. Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2002 Dec;4(6):441-8. A Note from Melissa Kaplan: I have been unable to locate Gail Berkowitz, the author of this above article, so please don't write me to ask me how to contact her - you can Google or Yahoo her as well as I can. I also have no information on the studies referred to in the article; to find information on them, you can get reprints of the above referenced journal articles (Taylor, et al., Geary and Finn, Cousino Klein and Corwin) and ask the authors any questions you may have regarding study participants, methodology, etc. In the case of Taylor, et al., , read the abstract online and download the full text PDF of the journal article). To view article in original, visit http://www.anapsid.org/cnd/gender/tendfend.html

US CANCER CARE IN CRISIS, EXPERTS SAY

(Photo) Gerry Broome / AP

 

MAGGIE FOX, NBC NEWS

September 10, 2013, 12:38 PM ET

 

A nurse prepares to administer chemotherapy treatment at Duke Cancer Center in Durham, N.C.

Cancer may be the most feared diagnosis, but Americans are getting disorganized care and they’re often not even getting treatment based on the best scientific evidence, a panel of experts reports.
It’s often too expensive, and the most privileged are getting far better care than people with lower income, minorities, people who live away from big cities and the elderly. And most cancer patients who are doomed to die still wrongly believe they might be cured.

And as the baby boomer generation ages, the U.S. is going to be hit with a tsunami of new cancer cases. It’s time to get organized, the Institute of Medicine committee says.

“As a nation we need to chart a new course for cancer care,” says Dr. Patricia Ganz, chair of the committee that wrote the report and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine and School of Public Health. “We need to make the healthcare system better.”
The Internet brings a unique opportunity to change this, with ways to make sure doctors follow the best protocols for treating patients, and making sure patients understand what they need and what is possible, the committee says.

Cancer is the No. 2 cause of death in the United States after heart disease, killing more than 500,000 Americans every year.

Because cancer becomes more likely as people get older, the numbers will go up exponentially. By 2030, the report projects, cancer rates will go up 45 percent, to 2.6 million cases a year.
Cancer is common, so a range of doctors and other specialists treat it. Often the care is very good, but too often it isn’t.
“One would expect an entire system to snap into place that would ensure that this patient receives all the treatments he or she needs,” Dr. Neil Wenger of UCLA, one of the committee members, says in a video released with the report. 

“That is not the way that this system works. We have the most highly trained oncologists but because we don’t have coordination among all clinicians, this care doesn’t serve patients well. Sometimes it even harms patients.”

So someone with colon cancer who goes to his community hospital maybe treated by a surgeon who doesn’t know to take out certain lymph glands for testing to see if the cancer has spread, says Ganz. “They may do too many tests,” she told NBC News.

Often doctors order too many CT scans or unnecessary MRIs, Ganz said. “These kinds of variations lead to potential risk or harm to the patient,” she said. “Obviously if you don’t have good access, you won’t get good care.” Plus it can be costly -- and patients often must pay a large chunk of this pricey and unnecessary care.

But patients shouldn’t have to rely on being able to get to big, famous cancer centers like MD Anderson in Houston, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York or Fred Hutchison Cancer Center in Seattle, says Ganz.

“The truth is, not everybody can travel,” says Dr. Clifford Hudis, president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, who was not on the panel. “We have a golden opportunity now that we are in the age of bioinformatics.” Electronic communications can help doctors connect to one another and share expertise, and it needs to happen more often, Hudis and the panel agree.

“Why shouldn’t any doctor who is using a computer and electronic records ultimately be able to gain from the experience of everyone? Then it won’t matter quite so much if you wander into a one-person office in a rural center," Hudis says.

Patients also need to get more informed, and they can’t be left to the mercy of misinformation on the Internet, adds Ganz. “We do recommend there be good quality information available in both written and social media,” she said. “What is out there and what is on blogs can be very distressing.”
The report points out that Americans often don’t understand a cancer diagnosis. Up to 80 percent given a diagnosis of incurable cancer don’t fully get it -- they think they can still be cured, the panel points out.

“Part of this has to do with human nature and the belief that you will be the exception,” Hudis says. But many oncologists are also reluctant to deliver the bad news that a patient will never be cured.
Americans often emphasize fighting cancer, characterizing patients as courageous survivors who either beat the odds, or went down after a good fight. But evidence suggests that so-called palliative care -- designed to ease pain and other symptoms -- not only makes patients more comfortable, but can help them live longer than intense chemotherapy.

And people shouldn’t die of cancer in an intensive care unit, the report says -- even though this is still happening far too often. Quality hospice care provides a better alternative.

On the other side, people often panic when they get a cancer diagnosis and may rush into treatment, says Ganz. “We don’t want to frighten patients,” she says. “I think the quality of care in many places around the country is really high and of a high standard. Patients need to understand that once they are told they have cancer, it is rarely an emergency."

With the exception of an unusual brain tumor or some forms of leukemia, there is usually not a hurry. “Most of the time you can make up your mind over several weeks,” Ganz says.

“It will take training of professionals and it will take big changes at a policy level including how care is reimbursed," says Betty Ferrell, an oncology nurse researcher at the City of Hope cancer center in California who was on the IOM panel. “But everything that we are advocating for is ultimately extremely possible.”

To see original post, go to http://www.nbcnews.com/health/us-cancer-care-crisis-experts-say-8C11121986