If I'm not mistaken, many women are now being diagnosed with cancer in old age. If every discovered non-benign cell is called Cancer, and all are treated, we can't answer a lot of questions: Are these all life-threatening cancers? Are all fast-growing? Would the person's immune system eliminate some of them? Would the person die of natural causes before the cancer caused serious damage? How much damage is done by the false positives and treatments for the 'positives'? What happened to all the women who did NOT have a cancer discovered (or treated) 'before mammography'? It's an unscientific leap to assume they all died before their time of undiscovered atypical cells in their breasts. I understand the desire to 'get it' before it becomes life limiting, but we don't know which we are seeing or what the outcome would be if it were unseen. Just because we can LOOK! LOOK! shouldn't mean we always need to CUT! CUT! I'm reminded of the adage of not consulting a surgeon if you don't want surgery. It's what they DO! Re: Pap testing. What is the rationale for this test for a woman who is not sexually active or who has only one longtime (trustworthy) partner?

joolsy, you are among friends and fellow change-of-life mates. I've been living the same roller coaster as you for the past 10 months. As the other learned women here have already written, we're here to listen and share. My H can't quite grasp what's going on with me either so he just pretends it's not happening and he treads very carefully around here now making every effort to not upset me. The only concrete advice I can offer is, on those days where your anxiety level is peaked and you are very brittle emotionally, just keep telling yourself that it won't last very long and you just need to concentrate on being as positive as you can be. It's hard, I know. When this first started with me I thought I was on the verge of a breakdown because my emotion's were all over the place and I didn't know what had happened to change me so. And there are still days where I seriously wonder if I've losing my mind or is it *just* hormonal?!! It really helped me to calm myself and not be quite as worried about my mental state once I realized I was perimenopausal and that is what I was experiencing. Like I said before, when I'm having a really bad day I focus on the fact that maybe tomorrow I will be normal again and if not tomorrow, the next day. It can get depressing. I sometimes get depressed and worried because I have no control over these feelings and I just have to ride it out until it passes. Melancholy is probably a better word to describe it. I had an extremely heightened day today. When I talked to people my mouth was running 100 miles an hour and I could not calm myself down all day. My heart was racing and I couldn't sit still. When I finally got home today I headed right to a hot bath and stayed in there for an hour, bathroom door locked so kids couldn't come in and bother me. It did the trick I was a new person two hours later and calmly worked through homework and music lessons this evening.

It's always good to read any study, whether it's old or new....I'm kind of doing my own "investigating"...My husband has been diagnosed with dementia and when I started really thinking, a lot of his buddies from high school have all gotten the same diagnoses...And in further checking, all these fellows played football...This was back in the late l940, early 50s, long before the helmets were made to "take the shock" of some of those hits...And then in further searching, I'm finding more and more fellows from that age group, who have played football are also in the same diagnoses class...When I asked the doctor if there could be a connection, he said, so many of the older pro football players are actually donating their brains to medical science to see if there might be a connection......

The actual statements in the abstracts of the original scientific research papers are: For the Meat paper: "Evidence from controlled experimental studies indicates that the high grazing/forage-based diets prescribed under organic farming standards may be the main reason for differences in FA profiles. Further studies are required to enable meta-analyses for a wider range of parameters (e.g. antioxidant, vitamin and mineral concentrations) and to improve both precision and consistency of results for FA profiles for all species. Potential impacts of composition differences on human health are discussed." And for the Milk paper: " It is concluded that organic bovine milk has a more desirable fatty acid composition than conventional milk. Meta-analyses also showed that organic milk has significantly higher α-tocopherol and Fe, but lower I and Se concentrations. Redundancy analysis of data from a large cross-European milk quality survey indicates that the higher grazing/conserved forage intakes in organic systems were the main reason for milk composition differences." ----------------------------------------------- H.Kuska comment: The author in the last link presented by Sclerid states: " It is therefore deceptive, in my opinion, to frame this difference as organic vs conventional when it is clearly grass-fed vs grain-fed." H.Kuska comment: deceptive? Both abstracts included the information as I presented it above. If the author had produced the papers, he (of course) could have stated the research in whatever alternate ways he desired - subject to approval by the reviewers and editor However, he was not the author. The present authors with the approval of the reviewers and the editor presented the information as published.