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Evidence suggests women's ovaries can grow new eggs

theguardian.com

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Re: Evidence suggests women's ovaries can grow new eggs

#51
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, I'm not denying the possibility that hormonal birth control can cause depression or that many women experience problems while on it (I've heard similar complaints to what you're describing). What I'm commenting on is your misrepresentation of what the study is "proving".

I used the word "show" not "prove" for that reason. Point taken though: in the future, I will use "showed a link" or "found correlation". I am really very careful not to use the word "proved" for the same concerns you have.

Not to keep arguing a dead point, but the word I cared about was "causes" not "show". The study shows pretty definitively ("proves") that a correlation exists. It does not show that hormonal birth control causes depression.

Regardless, I appreciate that you're making an effort to be careful. I've just been seeing this particular study making the rounds on Facebook and I felt like I needed to point out what the study actually says.

Re: Evidence suggests women's ovaries can grow new eggs

#52
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used the word "show" not "prove" for that reason. Point taken though: in the future, I will use "showed a link" or "found correlation". I am really very careful not to use the word "proved" for the same concerns you have.

Not to keep arguing a dead point, but the word I cared about was "causes" not "show". The study shows pretty definitively ("proves") that a correlation exists. It does not show that hormonal birth control causes depression. Regardless, I appreciate that you're making an effort to be careful. I've just been seeing this particular study making the rounds on Facebook and I felt like I needed to point out what the study…

Regardless of semantics, I'm glad you see it being shared on Facebook. I really hope it inspires women to stop taking their pills and go all Lysistrata until there is more research done and/or a better solution is invented. I mean, it's the same thing that was invented back in the 1960s. There's been very little progress.

I wish they could invent something semi permanent for men. Then we could cease having the current child support debates. Temporary vasectomy would be awesome for the world.

Re: Evidence suggests women's ovaries can grow new eggs

#53
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What astounds me is that the human brain doesn't even know it works (at least consciously). Your brain tells your body what to do, but your consciousness has no idea how. For me, that's what's so amazing about neural networks! If you could ask an individual neuron why their f(x) is the way it is, they probably would only be able to tell you that "that gets the result the brain wants". They're like individual computer…

To do such would require a subset of the brain to contain more information than the whole, which is clearly impossible.

Indeed, Godel's Theorem proves the futility of this.

Re: Evidence suggests women's ovaries can grow new eggs

#54

What bothers me is, so many doctors and scientists saying "no" / "it doesn't happen", as opposed to "we don't know". They haven't observed it -- or, as often, been told/taught it by someone else. So, it doesn't happen -- it doesn't exist. At this point, I feel outright lied to. I've made life decisions bases on such statements that proved to be patently false and not at all backed by real science. And a lot more anec…

"I've made life decisions bases on such statements that proved to be patently false and not at all backed by real science."

How would this knowledge impact a life decision? If your doctor told you "The ABVD I'm prescribing will make you infertile" and you decided to freeze your eggs, but later found out that ABVD didn't actually make you infertile, because of this phenomenon, well, sure, I could see that. But knowing the fact that ovaries are (possibly) capable of producing new eggs doesn't invalidate any of our current knowledge about how fertility declines with age, or the effectiveness of our current treatments for it.

Great, our ovaries might produce new eggs in addition to merely storing them, AND all of the statistics about infertility, difficulty conceiving, and chromosomal abnormalities still apply just as they did before we knew that! Even if our ovaries are producing new eggs right now while we're completely unaware of it, all of the statistics we have about fertility already take this into account, by virtue of the fact that... well, they were measured on women with ovaries.

Even if new fertility treatments are created out of this knowledge in the future, it's still many years out. First, this research has to be expanded, duplicated, and confirmed. Second, many many years of expensive clinical trials and research for the FDA need to be done. Third, there's a lot more that goes into fertility besides the eggs. And, while it's great that new research comes out, it's usually smart to hedge your bets and make life decisions that don't include the assumption that awesome new research is going to come out that will fix all your problems in the future.

Also, I wouldn't be so harsh to criticize the doctors who told this to you. Science is about evolving knowledge and discovering new things. Prior to this discovery, all the existing research suggested that women were born with all the eggs they would ever have. They cut open ovaries, counted eggs, looked at them under microscopes, studied how they matured, watched ovaries in vivo, and documented the organ as thoroughly as they could. Science! Now we have some more science that was just done, and it described a new feature of ovaries that we didn't know about before. Awesome!

This is like getting pissed of at Galileo because he lied about the number of planets in the solar system. I mean, sure, you could argue that Galileo should more accurately say "we only know about 6 planets, and there may be others out there" but, heck, there also could be some crazy cheat code out there to allow us to spontaneously regenerate limbs, or change our eye color on demand. You can't get made at doctors for saying: "No, your arm cannot be grown back" just because some crazy new research comes out five years later. We just don't know.

As unsatisfying as it can be sometimes, the best we can do is act on the knowledge that we know now, and simply adapt as we discover new things.

Re: Evidence suggests women's ovaries can grow new eggs

#55

> would raise the prospect of new treatments to allow older women to conceive This is a bit of ethical problem. Pregnancy at older age brings many risks to mother and child.

Sperm from older men also has higher risk of producing kids with genetic defects[0] [0] http://genetics.thetech.org/older-dads’-kids-higher-risk-gen...

Interesting, I hope they do in-depth study. I wonder how they'd deal with this issue from that article.

"But what is also obvious is that it can be very difficult to untangle mom and dad’s contributions because they tend to track together in age. Older dads tend to have children with older moms."

It's a pretty big confounding variable.

Re: Evidence suggests women's ovaries can grow new eggs

#56
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why we don't have several conscious thoughts at once.

Perhaps we do! How do you know that your autonomic nervous system isn't consciously regulating your breathing, digestion, and heartrate, blissfully unaware of the less important unconscious processes that acquire food and move about. (I wrote a science fiction story along these lines once, that was described by readers as "uh... interesting, I guess.")

Hell, I'd read it. Still kicking around a copy?

Re: Evidence suggests women's ovaries can grow new eggs

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are encoded in DNA. They are patterns in the physical structure of DNA beyond the raw A,T,G,C etc. Please be accurate in HN comments, and don't oversimplify for 'clarity' or 'readability,' especially for a topic as complex as the heritability of epigenetic traits. Additionally, Wikipedia [0] is a quite satisfactory source for information on epigenetics. Your casual dismissal of it suggests that you don't even kn…

Is this a smurf account? Why is this your first comment on a two day old account? My dismissal of the article was calculated, rather than casual. I read the Wikipedia page before commenting. That article, like many articles on Wikipedia, provides a great overview of the topic. However, it isn't a substitute for an actual education in the field. I stand by my claim that being able to read Wikipedia puts you on about t…

I refuse to offer a reasonable response to an ad-hominem attack.
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