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A female doctor is in a medical room with her patient. The doctor is reassuring the patient by touching her on the shoulder.
Saint Louis University researchers knew that tea, especially green tea, may help prevent various types of cancers. They also knew that oolong tea, which accounts for just 2 percent of the world’s tea (compared to 78 percent black tea and 20 percent green tea), is popular in the Fujian province of China and that Asian women typically have a lower incidence of breast cancer and, if they get it, less aggressive types. Then researchers connected that breast cancer cases and death rate percentages are lower than the national averages in the Fujian province. The pattern led SLU scientists and a visiting scientist from Fujian Medical University to explore how oolong tea could be a nontoxic preventative option.
In the study, published in the journal Anticancer Research, the five researchers documented treating six breast cancer cell lines (two ER- and PR-positive, one HER2-positive, and three triple-negative) with different concentrations of green, oolong, black, and dark tea extracts. Their findings? Green and oolong tea extracts prevented breast cancer cell growth in all six cancer cell lines, whereas those infused with black and dark tea extracts showed little to no difference.
“It’s very meaningful,” says Yifan Tu, an assistant professor of hematology and oncology at SLU and one of the study’s authors. With straightforward baseline tests like these, she says, “the hope is to just give some idea and to guide further for the experiment if needed. Next, maybe going to mouse models, then human experiments.”
Oolong tea as a preventive measure is “very doable…and doesn’t cost too much money,” Tu says. “You can cook tea—you don’t have to have a pharmacist make tea for you.”
Last year, a national study ranked St. Louis as having the highest OB/GYN workload in the United States, with an average of 247.23 births per physician per year. The study, conducted by medical social network Doximity, also ranked St. Louis No. 7 among metro areas at the greatest risk for an OB/GYN shortage and No. 4 among metro areas with the lowest percentage of OB/GYNs under age 40 (12.9 percent).
In other words, OB/GYNs are in high demand in St. Louis—and that demand may only increase in the years to come.
Aside from brain drain, many graduates are pursuing fellowships and become specialists, serving a small subset of patients. In addition, a desire for work-life balance may have some doctors working part-time or preferring predictable hours.
“While it may be a little harder to recruit to St. Louis, I think the bigger issue is that it’s hard to recruit to Missouri in general, and particularly rural Missouri,” says Dr. Mary McLennan, a SLUCare OB/GYN and chair of the Saint Louis University School of Medicine’s Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Women’s Health. In 2017, she notes, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists reported that half of U.S. counties didn’t even have one OB/GYN. To bridge the gap, McLennan cites telemedicine as a possible temporary solution. The real change, though, might have to come from initiatives to keep young physicians working in the state after graduation, particularly in low-population areas.
Globally, more than 176 million women suffer from endometriosis, an incurable disease in which the tissue that makes up the uterine lining grows on or inside other organs, often resulting in painful inflammatory lesions. In April, Washington University researchers published a study in the journal Human Reproduction showing that the broad-spectrum antibiotic metronidazole reduces the size of those lesions in mice. Further, the research indicated that the bacteria found in the gut microbiome could help accelerate or stop endometriosis’ progression. The next steps include a pre-clinical trial, which could prompt researchers to move forward with a clinical trial.
Principal researcher Ramakrishna Kommagani says the study’s original goal was to determine how gut bacteria, or microbiota, might be connected to endometriosis, but researchers may have also discovered an affordable treatment option: “a simple oral antibiotic,” as Kommagani says. “I think that’s very encouraging.”
