Don't see many studies from this part of the world--good to see a peer-reviewed journal carrying this.

There was slight improvement over placebo with St. John's Wort for hot flashes in the setting of menopause.

Of interest to breast cancer patients, it's speculated that plant estrogens in St. John's Wort are the reason for the benefit, so it remains to be seen how safe these substances are for cancer survivors.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60E3AV20100115

Today we opened the first sunscreen of the summer a Neutrogena stick containing titanium dioxide and zinc sulfate. Total cost for a small small stick: $7. Ouch! The California Baby version is $15! This works out to something like $1 an ounce or more. I personally am trying to avoid using the "synthetic" sunscreens on kids out of concern for estrogen-like effects. I haven't seen correlations with health outcomes per se but I would rather not add risk especially in my daughter where I don't need to. The titanium based sunscreens do not appear to have a hormonal effect on biology.

This from our esteemed colleague Andrew Pollack at NYT: WHI reports that Prempro amplifies the risk of lung cancer in smokers. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/health/research/31cancer.html?ref=glob... Well the women I see tend to have stopped using Prempro. My mother-in-law has been instructive: I got her to stop using Prempro a few years ago but she has gone back on Premarin alone and will only relinquish the medicine out of her cold dead hands I suspect. The issue here is the results of the Women's Health Initiative released in 2002.

A group of researchers report findings that water from plastic bottles have a higher estrogen effect on snails than water from glass bottles (at least in Germany). This is a fascinating result and the group claims this is the first time anyone has shown an estrogen effect in living creatures. Hopefully this will be the final nail in the coffin on the bottled water craze. This whole fad seems to have run its course though I'm not sure it will completely go away. New York City in particular is going through a lot of soul-searching over the environmental harms of bottled water.

Night sweats hot flushes and painful joint aches may counter-intuitively be good news for women using hormone-based medicine for breast cancer. It could mean that their tumours have a diminished probability of returning according to researchers. Such menopause-like symptoms in women after taking AstraZeneca's breast cancer drug Arimidex or generic tamoxifen were found to be 30 percent less likely to suffer a recurrence of their cancer in the subsequent nine years the study found.