Exert Co. Releases New Smart Body Coolant

Hot flashes and night sweats are not just an annoyance, they are a plague. At any time of the day, in any setting, and with any person, nature may strike and uncomfortable, menopause-induced hot flashes will occur. For as long as menopause has been around, there has been a need for cooling when the body turns the heat up. Exert Smart Body Coolant provides full-body cooling that women are searching for.

Exert Smart Body Coolant is proactive and applied to the body before a skin temperature spike, activating only when the spike occurs. Exert doesn’t feel cold when applied but instead works by drawing heat away from the body only when the body needs it. When skin temperature rises, Exert activates and cools the skin by 2 to 6 degrees. Arvind Rao, Chief Innovation Officer of Exert Co., explains that, “After cooling, Exert recharges quickly and is ready when your skin temperature rises again. This is what makes Exert more technologically advanced than anything else.”

This is welcomed news for the approximately 27 million women in the U.S. who have hot flashes or experience night sweats and that number is expected to grow 10 percent annually. Christopher Joyce, CEO of Exert Co., says, “Exert was created for one reason...to help people,” and help people it does.

The technology behind Exert is supported by a study published in the Annals New York Academy of Sciences. Women were tested in cold climates and hot climates when experiencing a hot flash. The duration and severity of the hot flash was then measured. Kronenberg and Barnard found that women who experienced a hot flash in a colder climate felt it less than half the time of a woman in a hotter climate. Exert provides the perfect, cool climate for the skin when needed.

Exert Smart Body Coolant is the culmination of more than three years of development, research, and testing by Exert Co., which was founded by Christopher Joyce and Arvind Rao.

Whether it is an uncomfortable episode during the day caused by a hot flash or restless sleep induced by a night sweat, menopause is an incredibly trying time for women across the globe. Exert offers the technology necessary to withstand the heated test of menopause and women can finally avoid the hot flash whiplash.

A 4 to 6-week supply of Exert Smart Body Coolant retails for $30. To learn more about Exert Smart Body Coolant, visit http://exertco.com or call 877-929-9922.

About Exert Smart Body Coolant
Exert Smart Body Coolant is a once a day body spray that activates only when skin temperature spikes. Exert cools the body by up to 6 degrees. Whether it’s menopause, hot flashes, stress, medication, anxiety environment, excessive sweating, or physical exertion, Exert Smart Body Coolant helps regulate skin temperature. To learn more, visit http://exertco.com.

About Exert Co.
Exert Co. is a Wilmington, DE based company that makes smart, functional, consumer products that solve “big market” problems in completely new ways.

Source: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1659030

Facts About Chronic Depression

Chronic depression, also known as major depressive disorder, will affect nearly 17 percent of U.S. adults -- more than 45 million people -- at some time in their lives. In any given year, about 7 percent of the population has the disorder.

The World Health Organization now ranks depression as the leading cause of disability worldwide, affecting more than 350 million people.

There is a substantial gender gap in depression, with about twice as many women as men suffering from the disorder. Scientists are still trying to figure out why, but they do not believe it is simply because women are more likely to seek help or admit having the disease.

About 40 percent of people who are depressed don’t seek treatment, some because of the stigma of admitting to having the illness. As one severely depressed patient told the Post-Gazette, “I still feel a great deal of shame and embarrassment. I still have that sense that I should have been able to fix it.”

Antidepressant drugs are still the leading treatment for the disease, although they are not very effective for milder forms of the disorder. In one of the largest real-world trials of antidepressant treatment, the Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression (STAR*D), only about 30 percent of people with depression who initially took a standard antidepressant had complete remission of their symptoms. In those who went on to a second phase of the trial, where they either switched medications or added a drug or psychotherapy to their existing treatment, just 25 percent achieved remission.

Studies have shown that certain types of talk therapy, particularly cognitive behavioral therapy and interpersonal therapy, are almost as effective as antidepressants.

Still, for those who are resistant to standard treatments, the outlook can be gloomy. As the STAR*D summary put it, “Patients with difficult-to-treat depression can get well after trying several treatment strategies, but the odds of beating the depression diminish with every additional treatment strategy needed.”

Seeking help

If you are concerned that you are experiencing symptoms of depression or have family members who are, you can contact these places:

• Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of UPMC has a call center for general inquiries and for scheduling outpatient appointments at 412-624-2000. The clinic, in partnership with Allegheny County, also offers the re:solve Crisis Network, which provides telephone, mobile, walk-in and residential behavioral health crisis services around the clock to any resident of the county at 1-888-7-YOU-CAN (1-888-796-8226).

• Help can be found at the West Penn Allegheny Health System by contacting www.wpahs.org/specialties/psychiatry, or calling 412-330-4000.

• The Southwest Pennsylvania chapter of the National Alliance of Mental Illness, which provides voluntary help and voice for those who have mental illness, can be reached at 412-366-3788, or toll free at 1-888-264-7972, or at info@namiswpa.org.

Source http://www.post-gazette.com/news/health/2013/12/15/Mysteries-of-the-Mind-Facts-about-chronic-depression/stories/201312110131

Why The Menopause Causes Such Awful Mood Swings?

At least women have someone to blame for the menopause – their parents.
Scientists claim that the hormonal mayhem is the result ‘genetic warfare’ between the DNA a woman inherits from her mother and that of her father.
One set of genes wants her to continue having children. The other wants her to stop.
The result is the hot flushes, mood swings, night sweats and other symptoms that go to make up the menopause.

The British and Japanese researchers said that learning more about the genes involved could lead to a test that tells a woman how long she has in which to start a family.
The study builds on the popular idea that the menopause evolved as a way of stopping our female ancestors from having children while they were still young enough to help care for the children of younger female relatives living nearby.
This allowed them to safeguard their genetic line, by lavishing their children and those of relatives with love and attention, without having to go through the trauma of childbirth again.
The team featured researchers from Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), St Andrews University in Scotland and Sokendai, the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Hayama, Japan.
They say that, in times gone by, women tended to move away from home and in with their husband’s family once they got married. This meant their children would typically be related to more of those around them through their father than their mother.
As a result, the genes a girl inherited from her father would in adulthood strive to stop her from having more children of her own so she could instead care for young relatives around her.

However, the DNA she got from her mother would want her to have more children of her own, to help ensure the genes from her mother’s side lived on.
RHUL researcher Dr Francisco Ubeda, who used maths to back up the theory, said: ‘The woman’s paternal genes are pushing for an early menopause, while her maternal genes are trying to stall the process.’
This conflict of interest could explain not only why women go through the menopause but also why it lasts so long and is so turbulent, the journal Ecology Letters reports.

St Andrews University researcher Dr Andy Gardner said learning more about the genes involved in menopause could help women decide how long to wait to start a family.
He said: ‘Now, when people are trying to decide, the best bit of advice they can be given is to look at the age their mother underwent the menopause.’
Dr Ubeda added: ‘Choosing if and when to start a family is one of the biggest decisions that we have to make in our lives.

‘Having better, individualised information about when our fertility is likely to tail off will help avoid anxiety and make sure that people don’t leave it too late.’
The research could also help doctors decide which methods of family planning they should  prescribe, based on a woman’s genetic background.
In the UK, the average age for a woman to reach the menopause – when their ovaries stop producing an egg every four weeks – is 52, although many experience it in their 30s or 40s.
Earlier research found that the drop in oestrogen levels during the menopause could be linked to the ‘senior moments’ suffered by older women but that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) helped.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2520861/Side-effects-menopause-cause-warring-genes.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490

Estrogen May Not Help Prevent Fuzzy Thinking After Menopause

There's a widely held belief that women experience moodiness and fuzzy thinking because of the drop in estrogen during menopause. And women have looked to hormone replacement therapy for relief.

But researchers increasingly think there's not much of a link between declining levels of estrogen during menopause and cognition.

Scientists at Stanford University tested the memory and overall mental sharpness of 643 healthy postmenopausal women. They then measured the women's natural hormone levels. They were particularly interested in a type of estrogen called , which typically drops after menopause.

The scientists also divided the women into two groups: those who had gone into menopause within the last six years, and those who were more than 10 years past menopause. That's because it's been thought that taking supplemental estrogen shortly after menopause helps women stay sharp more than if they start later.

But in both younger and older postmenopausal women, higher estradiol levels didn't seem to affect cognition.

The findings were in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The findings imply that for younger women who are considering , there's no need to rush into it because of the belief that it's going to improve memory," , a neurologist and the study's lead researcher, told Shots.

Henderson says the issue of during and post menopause has stumped researchers for years. While it's clear that some women experience haziness during the menopausal transition, research is less clear on whether menopause causes any long-term cognitive changes.

Though a few studies do suggest that menopause could be linked to a small amount of cognitive impairment, most recent research, Henderson says, haven't found any link.

Henderson's study could get us one step close to solving the puzzle. Still, it's no means the last word.

"I don't think the finding is surprising," says Dr. , a researcher at Harvard and Brigham and Women's Hospital. But, she tells Shots, "the results have to be interpreted cautiously."

Manson is a principal investigator with Women's Health Initiative, a long term national health study in 2002 that hormone replacement therapy didn't protect women from heart attacks and stroke after menopause. That research prompted many women to stop taking supplemental estrogen. But women still worry that not taking HRT means their brains aren't working so well.

While this new finding about estrogen and cognition seems to make sense, Mason says, this sort of observational study can only look at how hormone levels are associated with women's ability to think. It can't prove for sure that estrogen has no effect on the brain.

Another issue is that the study only looked at women's natural hormone levels. More research needs to be done before we can know for sure how supplemental estrogen affects women's mood and memory.

Henderson says he has already started looking at the effects of hormone supplements on the same group of women.

And he also wants to find out if higher levels of the hormone progesterone could be associated with better memory and thinking. This study suggests that it is, at least in younger women. That was an unexpected finding, Henderson says, and one that's worth looking into some more.


Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/11/25/247235428/estrogen-may-not-help-prevent-fuzzy-thinking-after-menopause