Key points from today’s guests:
Onalisa Winblad, M.D., breast imaging specialist; division director, Breast Imaging, The University of Kansas Cancer Center
- Women know their bodies best. If you feel like your concerns are being dismissed, seek a second opinion.
- Women tend to take care of others and go to bat for others but you can't be a source of strength unless you're healthy. So be an advocate for yourself. Get that second opinion if you don't feel comfortable with the first.
- The universal recommendation is for all women who are average risk to start screening at age 40. When women are screening every year starting at age 40, the death cancer rate from breast cancer drops by up to 42 percent.
- For some women, starting at age 40 is just not early enough. I recommend all patients have a breast cancer risk assessment by age 25 so that they can determine whether or not they are at high risk for breast cancer.
- So it's imperative that you know your breast cancer risk before you're 40 so that you know whether or not you need to start before that starting age.
- AI is a tool that helps with mammograms. We have several different programs that help us provide the best quality of images for our patients. One of those is a tool that evaluates our mammogram positioning and evaluates the breast compression that occurs during each mammogram image.
- It evaluates the radiation dose several factors that then are reported back into this program and allow us to provide performance feedback.
Marc Parrish, D.O., maternal-fetal medicine specialist, The University of Kansas Health System
- Overall, maternal mortality statistics in America are trending in the wrong direction.
- One of the reasons is that the nation is bad at surveillance.
- In the maternal deserts, we see higher rates of maternal mortality and higher rates of newborn mortality because those services for moms and their babies to have somebody that is adequately trained to take care of more complicated pregnancies, they just don't exist.
- Those patients have a huge disservice that's occurring to them and their families because the outcomes remain poor in those rural areas.
- We have moms that we take care of that have preexisting conditions like hypertension or diabetes, and if you don't control those things, you're going have poor pregnancy outcomes.
- Your mental health is just as important for your physical health. And those are things where there's been such a stigma, but it has gotten a lot better.
- The National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is 1-833-TLC-MAMA.
Anna Gorczyca, Ph.D., epidemiologist, The University of Kansas Medical Center
- Women experience different symptoms than men.
- I was doing some research and I believe it was 1995 when women were first allowed in clinical trials, which was only 30 years ago. So a lot of this work that's been completed is not done in women.
- There's a lot of evidence showing the negative impact of obesity on maternal outcomes as well as fetal outcomes.
- We're getting into more of modernized, individualized medicine and so there's not just a blanket recommendation for women if they're overweight or obese and they want to become pregnant.
- We just did a meta-analysis, which is taking all of the best research that's been done, and we found that lifestyle interventions were specifically the most beneficial on pregnancy outcomes, but there's just so little data on live birth, miscarriage, and other fetal outcomes.
- Mental health is important. you really have to take care of yourself if you want to able to take care of others and I think pregnancy is probably the best example of that.
- Have those conversations with your physicians because that's really a way to stay ahead of it going into the postpartum period.
Tuesday, May 21 at 8 a.m. is the next Morning Medical Update. A surprise infection put three-year-old Addie into kidney failure. We’ll show you how a mom’s sacrifice saved her daughter.
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