iStockphoto/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- Testosterone replacement has long been touted for men who suffer from abnormally low levels of the male sex hormone, but new research from Consumer Reports finds that the benefits of the drugs may not be worth the risk.

"We started to really look, take a closer look at these drugs and we've discovered that there are some very significant risks and the benefits of them really may not be as fantastic perhaps as the ads might lead you to believe," says Lisa Gill, prescription drugs editor at Consumer Reports.

The potential dangers, Gill says, include "breast enlargement, blood clots in the legs, enlarged prostate, sleep apnea, fluid retention in both your ankles and your feet."

"Testosterone may actually speed up the growth of prostate cancers, which is very alarming to us, but really the most alarming risk is an increase risk of heart attack," she adds.

Gill points out that while drugmakers in their ads make it sound like many men have a low testosterone problem, most don't suffer from abnormally low levels of the male sex hormone.

"This condition -- hypo-gonadism -- really only affects less than 10 percent of the male population, probably something closer to about 5 or 6," she says.

If you think you suffer from abnormally low testosterone, Gill advises you make a doctor's appointment because it could indicate something greater.

"Low testosterone can be a sign of actually other conditions, things like heart disease or kidney failure, heart failure, even diabetes, having osteoporosis, problems with your pituitary gland, or even tumors on your pituitary glands," she says.

Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio

iStockphoto/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- The mother of two children allegedly killed by their nanny last fall is pregnant again, and their story might provide an example for other bereft parents that life can still go on, according to experts.

Last October, Marina Krim came home after a swimming lesson with her 3-year-old daughter, Nessie, to find the bodies of her 2-year-old son, Leo, and her 6-year-old daughter, Lulu, in a bathtub.  Their nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, was charged with their murder.

On Thursday, Krim and her husband, Kevin Krim, announced they were expecting a baby.

In a post on the Facebook page for the Lulu and Leo Fund, an arts education fund created in honor of their children, the couple wrote they were "filled with many emotions as we look to the future, but the most important one is hope."

For parents who have experienced such a traumatic loss, experts say, a pregnancy can help with the grieving process even as it brings up other emotions.

"They still have a family [they] get to love and cherish and enjoy," said Dr. Marlene Maron, chief psychologist for Fletcher Allen Medical Center in Burlington, Vt.  "They are more appreciative than most of us who can whine and complain about the annoying things the people we love do. …You really become very grateful for every good day."

While the Krims have not given interviews, they've used Facebook to write about memories of their children and how they've dealt with their grief.

On Mother's Day, Marina Krim wrote about putting up sand dollars she had collected with her children on an earlier vacation.

"We lovingly collected over 100 sand dollars along Playa Coco during that trip," she wrote.  "Lulu was a particularly good and dedicated shell hunter. ... Mounting [the shells] on the wall this morning was therapeutic for me and a perfect way to connect with my angels this Mother's Day."

Maron said that the couple's decision to write about their grief on a social network site can help them through their traumatic loss by allowing online commentators to offer words of support or share their own stories, as well.

"That honors the memory of the child, but also helps you with their healing," said Maron.  "[When] other people are writing, then there's the shared collective experience."

While Maron said writing about loss can be helpful for some couples, she cautioned that everyone grieves differently and, even if parents decide to have another baby, it does not mean they will ever "get over" a child's death.

"There's no such thing as getting over the loss of a child.  There's no such thing as moving on or having closure," said Maron.  "[But even knowing] what could happen, you will have new joys."

Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio

iStockphoto/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- Many people suffer from depression as a complication after suffering a stroke, however, a new study shows that depression may be a risk factor for future strokes.

Researchers studied women born between 1946 and 1961, surveying the participants every three years between 1988 and 2010. Women were asked to self-report their depression, medication use and diagnosis or treatment. They also self-reported any stroke they may have suffered. Additionally, stroke deaths were identified using a national database.

Over 10,000 women participated in the survey, the results of which were published in the journal Stroke.

The data determined that women who were depressed were more than twice as likely to suffer a stroke than those who were not depressed.

The researchers believe that improvement in the diagnosis and treatment of depression could play a role in limiting stroke risk later in life.

Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio

Photodisc/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- Seventy two hours after Elissa Bantug's mastectomy, she felt broken. She was only 25 years old, but she had lost both breasts and her strawberry blonde hair to cancer. Drainage tubes still hung from her chest to remove excess fluid from the operation.

In that moment, she just wanted to have sex with her boyfriend.

"I just needed something to make me not feel so broken," said Bantug, who is now 31. "Anything to make me feel beautiful."

But instead of responding to her advances, Bantug said, her boyfriend pushed her off of him and told her it was crazy for her to have sex when she was so sick -- and so obviously in pain.

"It was awful," said Bantug. "It ended in a screaming match with doors being slammed."

Bantug said it was just one of the instances in which she and her boyfriend -- to whom she is now married -- didn't communicate well during her cancer experience. He had a hard time figuring out when he was supposed to let Bantug make decisions and when he was supposed to help her decide what to do. He didn't tell her how afraid he was.

When they did have sex, Bantug's boyfriend didn't know where to put his hands or whether putting them certain places would draw attention to Bantug's scars and upset her. He thought he should sleep in the guest room because he thought she needed the space to heal, but that made her worry that he was pulling away.

Now, Bantug knows better than to stay silent about these things, and it's her job to make sure cancer patients at Johns Hopkins Medical Center do, too. She runs the hospital's Breast Cancer Survivorship Program, where it's her job to answer the questions cancer patients and their spouses feel silly asking their oncologists.

Couples want to know about what to eat and how to tell their children about the diagnosis, but they also want to know about nipple sensitivity, body image and whether cancer patients will be able to have an orgasm again, she said.

Even though breast cancer is primarily about the woman fighting it, psychologist Jennifer Wolkin said conversations about relationships inevitably come up in her sessions with patients.

In addition to finding themselves thrust into the unfamiliar role of emotional supporter, men feel they need to deny their own feelings to be stoic, said Wolkin.

"They give off an air of self-assuredness to protect women, but, ironically, it comes off as rejection," said Wolkin, who works at the Joan H. Tisch Center for Women's Health at NYU Langone.

She said men often lack support centers and have to journey through cancer alone. If they show their feelings, they worry it somehow makes them weak. Sometimes, a man's libido can even drop -- not so much because he's no longer attracted to his wife, but because of the uncertainty associated with the situation and her body.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Men and women just need to communicate and ask for help when they need it.

"Mastectomy is horrific, but I think it has potential to offer this place where a man and woman could really significantly grow in their relationship," Wolkin said.

It's important for both partners to be as informed as possible about what's going to happen during breast cancer treatment and recovery, said Lynn Erdman, the vice president of community health for Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

Erdman, a nurse who specializes in oncology, said men have their own set of concerns and emotional issues when it comes to having a spouse with breast cancer, but they often don't feel comfortable talking about them because they think it makes them selfish. She said many hospitals now offer support groups for men as a safe place for them to ask questions that would otherwise seem taboo.

"What we hear a lot of times is, 'What's the breast going to feel like after the implant is in and the tissue in it has been removed?'" Erdman said. "'If I hug her, is it going to hurt her?' 'Will it change our sex life?'"

"I've seen it often bring couples much closer together," she said."It's part of going through the cancer battle together."

Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio

iStockphoto/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- With tiger moms, helicopter parents, and permissive and authoritarian models, parenting styles differ as much in the United States as they do in any country.

But can American parents learn something from their counterparts in different parts of the world?

The answer is yes, according to Christine Gross-Loh, author of the recently published book Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us. The Harvard-educated mother of four traveled to and researched parenting styles in Finland, Sweden, Germany, France, Japan, China, Italy and other countries.

American parents may not think they need any lessons. According to a study released in March by the Pew Research Center, moms and dads in the U.S. gave themselves good marks for how they raised their children. Almost 70 percent of parents with children under 18 said they have done a very good job or better. Only six percent rated themselves poorly.

In other parts of the world, American parenting styles stand out. When Gross-Loh and her husband were raising their four children in Japan, she noticed something unusual when they were playing in the park.
“I was the only parent following my children around the park and preventing disputes,” she said in an interview with ABC's Christiane Amanpour.

Japanese parents allowed their children to get into scrapes, she said, and felt that disagreements were character-building.

“Even though we in America prize independence and autonomy and freedom so much, children in Japan were being raised with a lot more of these qualities,” said Gross-Loh.

Without a doubt, good parenting means being involved in children’s lives. But Gross-Loh’s research led her to conclude that being over-involved is detrimental and undermining.

“We like children who can speak their own minds and give their own opinions and be their own person,” she said. “This is a part of being independent. But there’s a whole other part that I think we’ve been neglecting and that’s the idea of self-reliance and self-responsibility. Those are the sorts of ideas that I see being fostered in other countries that are not being fostered as well by many parents in the U.S. It’s not our fault. We’ve been told that it’s good to look out for our children and help them out.”

One facet in developing independent children seemed counterintuitive: co-sleeping. Gross-Loh pointed to a survey showing that out of 100 countries, the U.S. was the only one in which parents provided a separate sleeping place for their children. In other countries, when little children sleep in the same bed, the same room or nearby the parents, their levels of dependence better matched during day and night.

“The idea is that when you allow children to be dependent in this way when they are babies, then they can more easily move into age-appropriate independence as they get older,” said Gross-Loh. “And research does show that even American children who were co-sleeping with their parents were more independent in different ways."

“Parents who have this 24-hour relationship with their kids, in Japan, for example, were not as reluctant to ask more of their children during the daytime,” Gross-Loh added. “They could carry their own bags, walk to school on their own, do chores around the house. In the U.S., we have this tendency to think there are things they can’t handle during the day, but we ask them to do something different at night.”

Another aspect of self-reliance and independence is safety. But Gross-Loh argued that allowing children to take some risks is actually the best sort of protection to give them, something she saw in Japan and certain European countries.

“That is how they will form the judgments to deal with all sorts of situations,” she said.
Gross-Loh recounted visiting a kindergarten in the German forest and coming across a 5-year-old child whittling on a stick with a knife.

“He had been taught how to do it safely,” she said. “Meanwhile, a lot of children in the U.S. are not even allowed to pick up a stick at the school playground because it might hurt someone.”

Through raising her children abroad and her research, Gross-Loh said she has learned her own lessons for her family.

“For me, I learned that I could be more relaxed about parenting because there’s so many ways to be a good parent,” she said. “And a lot of them involve a lot less involvement than we believe we should be doing.”

But what about lessons that American parents can teach the rest of the world?

“One of the things that was really striking is that we strive to raise tolerant children,” said Gross-Loh. “In a way, it’s necessitated because we live in such a diverse society. But it’s the sort of thing I didn’t see in other cultures.”

Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio