10/24/00 - Stressed out

• Burned by lawsuits and low pay, radiologists are quitting, making women wait longer to find if they have breast cancer for or years, breast cancer specialists have quite rightly touted mammograms as the best way to detect tumors while they're small and highly treatable.

10/10/00 - Overlooked benefits of RU-486

• Doris Laird, a humanities professor at Florida A&M, believes RU-486, the controversial abortion pill that won government approval late last month, will be a lifesaver. She should know. The 69-year-old Laird has been taking the drug for seven years, not to induce abortion but to control a slow-growing, benign brain tumor called meningioma that once threatened her vision and her life.

09/26/00 -  When drugs are the only choice for a mother-to-be

• Jennifer Peterson was 35 and barely one week pregnant when she noticed a lump the size of half a banana in her breast. A few weeks later, tests showed she had invasive breast cancer. The irony was mind-numbing: A potential new life beginning inside her, her own life threatened

04/11/00 - Treatment Offers Some Relief For Incontinence

• Maria Dube is a 37-year-old Burlington woman with two young sons who has a problem that's often hushed up, though it's shared by 20 million Americans, two-thirds of them women. The wear and tear of childbirth left Dube, a telephone service representative for a Boston bank, with stress incontinence, which meant that every time she sneezed, laughed, jumped or chased her kids, she leaked urine. Asthma made things even worse. "I coughed so frequently, I had to use a pad all the time," she said

03/21/00 - Domestic Abuse

• When the young woman's mother came to visit her in New York, she was astounded at all the rice her daughter kept in the cupboard. When the mother asked why, the daughter shrugged. Her husband, she explained, always complained that she ``didn't make rice as fluffy as his mother did.'' So she'd keep trying over and over. ``There's nothing wrong with the way you make rice,'' gasped the mother. What was wrong, both women realized, was that the daughter was caught in an abusive relationship.

03/14/00 - Thyroid, Cholesterol Are Linked

• Most Americans know by now that eating a diet high in saturated fat can raise cholesterol, a major risk factor for heart disease, which kills nearly 500,000 people a year and is the leading cause of death for both men and women. But what many people don't know is that an underactive thyroid - the butterfly-shaped gland in the neck that produces a crucial hormone that regulates metabolism - may also contribute to high cholesterol.

03/07/00 - Calculating The Risk Of Hormone Therapy

• It takes a village, or so they say, to raise a child. Well, it's beginning to take a whole village - and a high-tech one at that - to sort out the risks and benefits of hormone-replacement therapy.

02/22/00 - HPV Test Is Urged By Some

• The Pap smear, used to detect cervical cancer, is done 50 million times each year in the United States and remains one of the best cancer-detection tools doctors have. In the 50 years since it was introduced in the United States, the death rate from cervical cancer has dropped by 70 percent. In poor countries that don't yet do Pap screening, cervical cancer is a leading cause of cancer death in women.

02/15/00 - The Saga Of Soy

• Consumers believe soy is good food, and research shows they're partly right  Americans have fallen in love with the humble soybean. Convinced that in its many incarnations - tofu, soy milk, dietary supplements - soy can prevent everything from heart disease to hot flashes to cancer, consumers have sent soy sales soaring. In the 12 months ending in October 1999, supermarket sales of soy foods were up 45 percent over the previous year, to nearly $419 million, according to Spins, a San Francisco market research company.

02/08/00 - Facial Workouts Don't, In Fact, Really Work At All

• I sat there glued to the TV, trying to imitate the model on the video, who was cheerily flexing her zygomaticus muscles - which run from the cheekbone to the corners of the lips - and keeping the rest of her face relaxed. Not so easy. Then she worked her levator labii superioris, raising her lips up into a sneer. Then she attacked her chin, working the depressor labialise.

11/08/99 - Cutting-edge drugs a must in treating rare cancer

• With any serious disease, it's obviously a good idea to find the best doctor - and the best hospital - you can. But with ovarian cancer, a rare disease that strikes 25,000 women a year, kills nearly 15,000, and is almost impossible to detect early - it's absolutely essential.

08/02/99 - Procedures done in the womb both amaze and raise many questions

• Etched in the memories of Dennis and Melinda Stover is the day they learned their baby would be born with spina bifida.It was January, and Melinda, a 26-year-old-bank teller from Murfreesboro, Tenn., was 20 weeks pregnant. She was having an ultrasound exam because they already had two girls ``and if it were a boy, we had a lot of stuff to buy,'' said Dennis, a 31-year old surgeon's assistant. No matter what the exam might show, abortion was unthinkable: ``We're born-again Christians.''

07/05/99 - Sorting out benefits, risks of HRT

• It's never been easy sorting out the pros and cons of taking estrogen supplements at menopause. Women have always had to weigh the many benefits -- reduced hot flashes, lower risk of heart disease, osteoporosis, colon cancer, and perhaps Alzheimer's -- against the modest but distressing risks, notably an increased chance of breast cancer and blood clots. But lately, with every new study, it's gotten more complicated.

02/22/99 - Sizable risks call for caution on Liposuction

• She's 37, and, at 5-feet-7 and 160 pounds, not as thin as she'd like. So when her new boyfriend suggested liposuction and agreed to foot the $6,500 bill, she agreed. ``I was slightly insulted,'' says the woman, a graphic artist from Roxbury. But her boyfriend had had the same surgery and she wanted to be able to tuck in her blouses again.

12/21/98 - Medical needs, politics collide

• Sixteen years ago, Doris Laird, a humanities professor at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in Tallahassee, developed a benign brain tumor the size of an orange. She had surgery -- an operation that took 22 1/2 hours. It worked, or so she thought. But four years later, the tumor, a meningioma, was back. She had more surgery; 12 hours this time. Six years ago, it came back again, growing so much it threatened her vision -- and her life. She had another 12-hour operation.

11/30/98 - At last, help for the fungus among us

• So you think toenail fungus is a joke. Not even a blip on the radar screen. Of interest only to your pedicurist, if that. Well, try telling that to Gertrude Patenaude, a 57-year-old teacher-librarian from Portsmouth, R.I. who had the fungus on every toe. ``It was brutal,'' she says. ``I couldn't put my feet in shoes because of the pain.''

11/02/98 - The midwives' time has come -- again

• Carol Rose, a Harvard-trained lawyer from Melrose, was pregnant with her first child two years ago when her health plan pulled a switch. She was in the exam room, waiting for her female doctor when a male doctor walked in. She's not anti-men, or anti-doctor, but this guy was a bad match. ``I had a bunch of questions,'' she says. ``He said, `I have limited time.' I felt so dehumanized and medicalized that I left.''

10/19/98 - Thyroid ills catch many by surprise

• To listen to Lisette Mancini, a 40-year old Walpole audiologist and mother of three, you might be tempted to conclude that thyroid troubles are a blessing. Years ago, as a student at Boston College, her metabolism was cranked so high she ``flew through school because I had so much time to study. I never slept. I was never tired,'' she recalls. She got all A's, carried a double major, and did an honors thesis.

09/28/98 - Four new drugs promise major relief for arthritis

• For years, millions of Americans with arthritis have been caught in a troublesome trap. If they don't take medication, they often suffer severe pain and life-wrecking disability. Yet if they do, they risk worrisome side effects. Some drugs, like methotrexate and high dose prednisone, can suppress the immune system. Others -- notably painkillers like aspirin, Anacin, Advil, Motrin IB and others -- can cause stomach ulcers and bleeding.

09/21/98 - The other ways the sexes differ

• Women, at least in America, outlive men by six years. So how, then, do you account for this?

06/01/98 - Diapers not only option

• Over the years, Kathy Duffy, a 38-year-old school teacher in Reading, tried many treatments for her severe incontinence -- pills, injections, exercises, even ``retraining'' her bladder. Everything helped some. Even so, she was always ducking out on her second graders to rush to the bathroom. She didn't sleep much, either. The urge to urinate woke her every hour or so.

04/06/98 - Women do have more pain, but they cope

• Jean Cummings, a 38-year-old urban policy analyst from Cambridge, lives in almost constant pain. Diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis 10 years ago, she's had two hip replacements and will have both knees replaced in June, right after her wedding.

03/23/98 - Treatment options are growing for women with bleeding disorders

• Teresa Menz, a 34-year-old teacher from Sidney, N.Y., tried almost everything for her fibroids -- benign uterine tumors that cause pain and bleeding in millions of women. With more than 100 fibroids, Menz's belly was as big as that of a woman 26 weeks pregnant and she hemorrhaged during every menstrual period. She tried hormone treatment for a year and had four major operations. Nothing worked.

03/16/98 - Dancing to siren song of pheromones

• In the late 1960s, Martha McClintock, then a Wellesley College student, was captivated by the dormitory buzz: Women who hung out together got their menstrual periods at the same time. It wasn't the first time women had noticed this, but McClintock was intrigued. And it only made her more so when male researchers with whom she studied one summer at Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, pooh-poohed the whole thing.

02/16/98 - Midlife women finding Estrogen alternatives

• For the past year, Barbara Lash, a 49-year-old ex-nurse from Franklin, has been determined to fight her hot flashes with anything but the standard prescription drugs like Premarin. On the advice of her nurse practitioner, Lash drinks a soy shake and eats tofu every day. She also nibbles cereal with flax seed, uses herbs like black cohosh and chaste tree berry, takes walks daily and lifts weights when she can.

01/05/98 - Making a place for nursing mothers

• When Barbara Doherty, 32, returned to her job at John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co. last year three months after having a baby, she encountered a modern woman's dream. Like a growing number of companies, the Hancock provides a ``mother's room,'' where Doherty used a company-funded electric breast milk pump three times a day -- 20 minutes per session -- to express milk for her infant son. She then stored the milk in a refrigerator and took it home at night for the babysitter to give her son the

10/06/97 - A question of timing - Does it matter when in your cycle you have a mammogram or breast surgery?

• This summer, a Canadian study of nearly 7,000 women came to a startling conclusion: that a mammogram done during the second half of the menstrual cycle is twice as likely to miss a lurking cancer as one taken during the first half. For now, these researchers think this applies only to women who use or have used hormones such as birth control pills. And because there is so little other research on the question, the finding could turn out to be a statistical fluke.

01/13/97 - The downside for female athletes

• It was a moment that 14-year-old Meaghan O'Connor of Dover, N.H., says may stay with her for the rest of her life. She was charging for the ball in the midst of a heated basketball game last summer. Suddenly, another girl's knee smashed into hers.

12/16/96 - In estrogen replacement therapy, less may be better

• Call it coffee klatch research. Or book group medicine. Or just plain winging it. By whatever name, women of a certain age are trying to figure out for themselves -- and with each other -- the answers to a midlife question doctors won't have good answers to for years.

11/25/96 - There's no cure in sight for Lupus, but outlook's much better

• Lupus -- ``the wolf'' -- began stalking Debra McGann, a 40-year-old Waltham teacher, 15 years ago. It made her deathly ill during all four of her pregnancies, and probably caused two of those pregnancies to fail.

09/23/96 - Women shouldn't feel bad about feeling bad

• When a stressed-out man walks into Alice Domar's office and walks out an hour later with a relaxation tape in hand, chances are he'll do what she recommends -- take 20 minutes a day to listen to it. And feel much better. But when a woman with the same -- or worse -- symptoms gets those tips and stress-reduction tapes, things turn out quite differently, says Domar, a psychologist at Deaconess Hospital.

08/05/96 - Menstrual cycles and rhythm of disease

• What if you had breast cancer and discovered that timing surgery to coincide with a particular point in the menstrual cycle might make a difference in your prognosis? Or what if you had diabetes and learned that insulin sensitivity varies with menstrual rhythms? And what if you were plagued by other miseries, like migraine headaches or
  yeast infections or systemic lupus erythematosus, that also seem to wax and
  wane along with the menstrual cycle?

07/29/96 - Working with the body's rhythms

• The night belongs to asthma. If you're one of America's 10 million asthmatics, you may find that your symptoms vary like, well, night and day, with the odds of an attack vastly greater in the wee hours -- about 4 a.m.-- than in daylight.

06/24/96 - The other heart attack risks: Anger, grief, fear

• Fifteen years ago, at 10:53 on a February evening, the people of Athens were jolted by an earthquake that measured 6.7 on the Richter scale. Within an hour of the quake and for three days afterwards, terrified Athenians were dropping dead at more than twice the normal rate

06/10/96 - Getting a fix on the thyroid

• Fifteen years ago, at 10:53 on a February evening, the people of Athens were jolted by an earthquake that measured 6.7 on the Richter scale. Within an hour of the quake and for three days afterwards, terrified Athenians were dropping dead at more than twice the normal rate. This suggested, at least to Harvard School of Public Health epidemiologist Dimitrios Trichopoulos, that mental stress had triggered the increased deaths, most of them from heart attacks.

05/06/96 - From biotech to bees, new answers to MS

• Kelly Ames, a staff assistant at Harvard Business School, is only 28 years old. But in the six years that she's had MS, a neurological disease that causes loss of coordination, partial blindness, even paralysis, she's tried nearly every remedy in sight.

01/22/96 - Fine-tuning the pap smear with technology

• The humble Pap test, a screening test so good that American women now die of cervical cancer at only one-fifth the rate of 50 years ago, is one of the best tools in modern medicine. Unlike mammograms, which detect breast cancers at an early stage, Pap tests spot abnormalities in cervical cells even before they become cancer. But...

01/08/96 - Drink up - or not? Studies in women are at odds on alcohol's risks and benefits

• Last May, a huge Harvard study of more than 85,000 women showed that moderate drinking -- about one drink a day -- lowers the overall risk of death, without apparently raising the odds of dying from breast cancer. Six weeks later, another big study -- of more than 16,000 women -- came to a more sobering conclusion: Over a lifetime, even one drink a day may slightly raise breast cancer risk.

10/09/95 - For some, pregnancy option remains after breast cancer

• It was early fall, 1993 -- decision time for Ann Wheeler of Brookline. She was 42, a self-described "late bloomer," and she had finally resolved that with or without her boyfriend's assistance, she was going to get pregnant by spring and have the baby she'd dreamed of for years.

08/14/95 - The day that many women dread the most

• The waiting room is hushed, as always. The women sit in silence, lined up in chairs against the wall, clad in flimsy johnnies, leafing pointlessly through old magazines. One by one, their names are called, first for the X-rays, then -- after an agonizing wait -- for the results. It's Mammogram Day, for many women the worst day of the year