Reply to Why does my doctor say HRT for women under 50 is not safe but everyone around me is taking it and feeling good?

Forum Index » Perimenopause, Menopause, and Beyond

Reply to "Why does my doctor say HRT for women under 50 is not safe but everyone around me is taking it and feeling good?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My doc says I'm not ready for HRT because my cycle is regular. Because I am showing signs of perimenopause, she recommends low dose BC with estrogen. Later I will be a candidate for HRT.[/quote]

Isn’t BC HRT?[/quote]

It's MORE THAN HRT. The doses are higher than the hormone doses in most HRT regimens. This is why BC is used to "take control of your menstrual cycle" as part of IVF regimens and HRT is not. The BC pill doses, while they are lower than they have been (although note: the lowest-dose options often do not work as well for women over 150 lbs), are [b]high enough to suppress the body's natural hormone production and replace it with the synthetic. [/b][/quote]

Incidentally--this is also why birth control pill use so dramatically lowers the risk of ovarian cancer. It's 30-50% lower among women who have EVER used oral contraceptives. This is because the fewer times the body goes through the naturally occuring cycle of estrogen production--which happens principally in the ovaries--the less likely ovarian tissue is to become cancerous.

By the time a person who still has ovaries is in a position to be receiving HRT, the estrogen situation is nowhere near that. It is being produced in fits and starts and overall at a dramatically lower rate than earlier in life. Blood testing of this is mostly useless, because you could have a spurt of estrogen production at any point in time that registers high on a blood test as a point-in-time assessment. If menstrual cycles have started changing, estrogen production has decreased, probably precipitously.

This happened to me at 47. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics