CAMBODIA FOLLOWS IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF INDIA AND THAILAND TO BAN SURROGACY

The Cambodian Ministry of Health has decided to ban recourse to surrogacy given the nationwide increase in this practice since surrogacy was banned in Thailand and India. Moreover, until now, the cost of surrogacy in Cambodia has been very low compared to the United States. In the absence of legislation, clinics accepted homosexual partners as well as single people.

Last week, the Cambodian Health Ministry sent a memo to clinics offering surrogacy services, stating the following: "There is a permanent ban on surrogacy", adding that, concerned about spin-offs, the government "is working towards legislation that will protect women and children from becoming objects of trafficking".

For Sam Everingham, founder of  Families Through Surrogacy, an association dedicated to surrogacy, access to Cambodian surrogate mothers represented "an industry that has rapidly developed in a country that was not prepared to face up to facts, particularly in terms of medical services". He added that the decision taken by the Cambodian Government "will spread panic amongst the numerous intended parents... just as we saw in Thailand".

Australian woman gets pregnant twice in 10 days

An Australian woman who was told she might never become pregnant says she has given birth to twins conceived 10 days apart.

Kate Hill was receiving hormone treatment for polycystic ovary syndrome, a condition that meant she was not ovulating.

She apparently conceived twins at different times d

espite only having unprotected sex once during that time.

It is very rare for a woman to conceive a second time when already pregnant.

Most twins are the result of a woman releasing two eggs at the same time, or, less commonly, a fertilised egg subsequently splitting into two.

The twin girls, Charlotte and Olivia, were born 10 months ago with different sizes, weights and gestational development, according to reports.

"We actually did not realise how special that was until they were born," Mrs Hill told Australia's Seven Network.

Pregnancy normally stops the monthly cycle of ovulation but very rarely a woman can release another egg after conceiving. If this is fertilised it could also implant and develop into a healthy pregnancy.

It is believed only 10 cases of the phenomenon, known as superfoetation, have been documented across the world.

Speaking about the rare conception, Mrs Hill's husband Peter joked: "Hole in one, maybe."

The couple's obstetrician Brad Armstrong said the condition was so rare he was forced to search for it online.

"I could not find any literature in the medical review websites at all," he said.

A MATERNAL BLOOD TEST COULD PREDICT PROBLEMS AT BIRTH

A protein circulating in the blood of pregnant women could be used to develop antenatal tests to determine the health of babies and predict the need for emergency care at birth, based on a study conducted by Queen Mary University London (QMUL).

The test conducted in mice and then in a cohort of 129 women, has shown that levels of the blood marker known as DLK1 are a good predictor of foetal growth and pregnancy-related complications. Scientists are considering using this marker as a non-invasive ante-natal screening tool but recommend further studies to consolidate their results.

 Doctor Marika Charalambous who led the study explained that this discovery could identify the causes of a small-sized foetus, clarifying whether this is due to a nutrient deficiency in the uterus or simply genetic factors. This precise information will allow obstetricians to plan for any complications on delivery.

 DLK1 is a protein that is found in large quantities in the mother's blood during pregnancy, in humans and rodents. However, its role has not yet been fully elucidated. The study -  financed by the Medical Research Council and published in the Nature Genetics Journal - has shown that this protein comes from the embryo. Concentrations in maternal milk could give a direct indication of the biological condition of the embryo.

Moreover, DLK1 levels have proved to be good indicators of foetal weight with low DLK1 levels being linked to reduced foetal growth.

Chinese medicine technique may offer some relief in perimenopause

A Chinese medicine technique using a smooth-edged instrument to scrape or rub certain areas of the body may relieve troublesome symptoms women experience in the years leading up to menopause, according to a new study.

Perimenopause can begin eight to 10 years before menopause, as estrogen levels fluctuate and start declining but menstrual cycles continue. During this time, and for another year or more after menstruation stops, women may experience hot flashes, insomnia, tiredness, mood swings, forgetfulness, aches and pains, vaginal dryness and pain during sex.

It's estimated that 75 percent to 92 percent of women going through perimenopause have at least some of these symptoms, and about 40 percent find them problematic enough to seek help, the study authors write in the journal Menopause.

Gua sha therapy is one of the most commonly used techniques in Traditional Chinese Medicine, they add, and it's thought to work by enhancing surface circulation and producing an antinflammatory effect.

"Gua sha therapy has been widely applied in clinical practice in China," said coauthor Pei-bei Duan of Jiangsu Province Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Nanjing.

Past studies have found it may prevent or treat many common and frequently-occurring conditions, such as acute or chronic pain, colds, flu, fever, heatstroke, asthma and emphysema, Duan told Reuters Health by email.

For the study, researchers recruited 80 women with perimenopausal symptoms from a clinic at the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine and divided them randomly into two groups.

One group received only conventional treatment, in this case drinking a liquid derived from traditional Chinese herbs called Qingxin Zishen Tang twice daily. The other group received the same conventional treatment plus weekly 15-minute Gua sha sessions, in which a therapist used a buffalo horn scraper and a skin lubricant to stimulate "acupoints" similar to those targeted by acupuncture focusing on the back, lower limbs and upper limbs for eight weeks.

Gua sha scraping causes red or purple marks on the skin which typically fade within seven days, the authors note.

After eight weeks, scores on a menopause-specific quality of life questionnaire had improved for both groups of women, but significantly more for the women in the Gua sha group. They also experienced greater reductions in hot flashes and sweating, insomnia, nervousness, melancholia, fatigue and headache than the comparison group receiving only conventional treatment.

The available studies on this topic are few and weak, said Dr. Francesco Cardini of the Health and Social Regional Agency in Emilia Romagna in Italy, who was not part of the new study.

"As with other traditional practices, Gua sha treatment, which creates superficial transitory skin lesions, may not be accepted by women with non Chinese culture," Cardini told Reuters Health by email.

"Gua sha therapy for perimenopausal symptoms was well tolerated by participants in our study," Duan said. "Only two transient and mild adverse events were reported and no serious adverse events occurred. Both were deemed unrelated to Gua sha. The two cases both had mild dizziness; one was caused by hypoglycemia because the patient did not eat breakfast, and another one was too nervous at the first treatment."

The long-term benefits of Gua sha therapy are not known, Duan said. Theoretically, women in China have access to this therapy, but only at large Traditional Chinese Medicine hospitals.

"Women who live in rural areas have to travel a long way to the cities to get the therapy, which is inconvenient," Duan said. "If women have the access to Gua sha therapy, they should try it."

In the U.S., some licensed massage therapists offer Gua sha therapy and it has been endorsed by celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow.

Researchers develop new technique that measures speed of rotating semen

The maths of collective behavior has provided a new technique for selecting the best semen for artificial insemination in livestock.

In the world of artificial insemination, it is well known that the most active semen samples indicate strongly swimming sperm, and the most fertile males. The activity of the semen is currently ranked on a scale between one and five, but this is based on the subjective views of observers down a microscope.

Now, in an effort to quantify the ranking, researchers from Imperial College London, the University of Toulouse and the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, have developed a method that measures the speed of rotating semen.

The technique, and results of the study of semen motion, are published this month in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Semen samples are usually ranked on the mass motility (MM) scale, based on how turbulent the churning of semen is in a drop on a microscope slide. The motion of sperm in the semen drop appears random, and observers assign the activity of this motion a number from one (lowest) to five (highest).

The team studied the motion of ram's semen to see if they could determine patterns that could be quickly mapped by computer, providing a more objective ranking. What they found was that if the semen was confined to a ring of plastic on the microscope slide, at a certain sperm concentration it would start to collectively rotate in one direction.

The spinning is faster according to the MM score, providing a simple measure that can be automatically assessed by computer.

It was not known previously that highly concentrated semen would behave this way, but there were clues from the animal kingdom. Professor Pierre Degond, from the Department of Mathematics at Imperial, studies the maths of mobs and collective behavior.

He said: "Experiments with locusts have shown that if you have just a few locusts, they will jump in random directions. But confine them and add enough locusts, then they will start to move coherently in the same direction, just like the sperm in our experiment."

Below a certain concentration threshold, the semen will behave in a more random way again, even when confined. Ram's semen is 50-100 times more concentrated than human semen, but Professor Degond thinks the same pattern would be observed if human semen were concentrated first. However, his next work is in how sperm swim once they are inside the female.

He said: "Fertility is a factor not just of how well the sperm swim, but how they interact with the female environment. They have to swim through a mucus rich in proteins that form a sort of mesh maze for them, and we want to study how they do this."