ESTROGENS AND THEIR EFFECTS ON YOUR EMOTIONS AND OVERALL HEALTH
First, let’s ensure you understand that natural estrogens created by our Creator DO NOT CAUSE CANCER. They might feed cancer that is already present. Key word is: MIGHT. When a woman has breast cancer the first thing the doctors do is a biopsy to determine if the tumor or cancer is sensitive to estrogen and/or progesterone. If it shows positive they tell you to remove all estrogen and progesterone from your body! This is terribly wrong-headed. Did you know that brain tissue, heart, joints colon, bone, etc all have estrogen / progesterone receptors? Yet someone with brain cancer or colon cancer is NEVER told to lower their hormones.
Heavily Processed foods, alcohol, chemicals, and overly cooked fatty meats are far more damaging to your breast cells and actually do cause cancer and feed cancers. And removing all those heavily processed foods, alcohols, chemicals, and fatty meats has zero negative effects on the body!
But…. Removing estrogens from the body (or stopping their flow) WILL absolutely contribute to CANCER, HEART DISEASE, OSTEOPOROSIS, DEPRESSION, THINNING SKIN, ACHES AND PAINS, POOR SLEEP, POOR DIGESTION, VAGINAL DRYNESS, INABILITY TO HAVE AN ORGASM, URINARY TRACT INFECTIONS, HEADACHES, ANXIETY, HAIR LOSS, ETC.
I totally get it that your oncologist or medical doctor might have scared the living daylights out of you about estrogen and breast health. I also completely understand the fear that cancer creates. It’s just so important as we age that we also pay attention to the quality of our life. No doctor bothers to push for you to remove heavily processed foods, alcohol, chemicals, and overly fatty meats which we know for certain causes cancer and feeds cancers of all types. Yet one single hormone (if removed) will destroy your quality of life is pounced on.
So let’s look at some of the important benefits that estrogens (Estradiol, Estrone, Estriol) give to a woman…
Estrogen is a hormone produced predominantly by your ovaries with small amounts coming from your adrenal glands. It helps to regulate your menstrual cycle and the development of female characteristics during pregnancy, such as breasts.
It also plays important roles in bone health, memory and cognition and cardiovascular health and is essential for many bodily functions, including:
Temperature regulation
Maintaining healthy and strong muscles and joints
Helping your nerves work correctly
Maintaining a healthy metabolism
Improving the way your immune cells work and function
Reducing inflammation throughout your body
Improving the way other neurotransmitters (such as serotonin) work in your brain
Keeping the lining of your vagina and vulval tissues healthy and lubricated
Estrogen is actually an umbrella term for three types: estradiol, estrone and estriol. Estradiol is the main type of estrogen produced by your body in your reproductive years.
What You Might Experience With LOW ESTROGENS:
Feeling puffy and bloated
Paresthesia (tingling-numbness-pins & needles feeling or buzzing feeling) in hands, arms, feet, legs, face
Rapid weight gain
Breast tenderness
Mood swings
Increased stress levels
Painful intercourse
Rotator cuff tears
Dry eyes, dry skin
Heavy menstrual bleeding
Period disappears or is late
Feeling anxious and/or depressed
Migraine headaches
Have had cervical dysplasia (abnormal pap smear)
Insomnia, trouble with sleep
Weepy and emotional
Vulvovaginal atrophy (painful sex, itching, dryness etc.)
Brain fog
Hair Loss
Osteoporosis
Lichen Sclerosis
Leg Cramps
Joint pains (knees, shoulders, neck, elbows, hands, feet, etc.)
UTI’s due to thinning tissues
Common Myth: A woman no longer produces any estrogen or progesterone during menopause because she is no longer releasing any eggs: But the truth is that women do not ever stop making sex hormones but levels drop during menopause naturally. Estrogen not only successfully controls menopausal symptoms in most women but also significantly reduces the risks of heart disease, hip fractures, colon cancer, and Alzheimer’s and in most cases is medically ok for those with breast cancer. Ref: Tavris, Carol; Bluming, Avrum. Estrogen Matters (p. 6). Little, Brown and Company.
You have estrogen receptors in cells throughout your entire body, so when levels fluctuate and fall, this can trigger wide-ranging and varying symptoms including low mood, anxiety, memory problems, poor sleep, joint aches and pains, brain fog, hot flushes and vaginal dryness.
- In 1991, cardiologist Lee Goldman and statistician Anna Tosteson, both at Harvard Medical School, wrote a lead editorial for the New England Journal of Medicine titled “Uncertainty About Postmenopausal Estrogen: Time for Action, Not Debate.” A consensus of epidemiological studies, they wrote, had shown that women who were given postmenopausal estrogen had a 40 to 50 percent reduction in the risk of coronary artery disease compared with women who had not taken hormones.
- Research recently on animals suggests that estrogen also “has an anesthetic role and might prevent cartilage erosion such as occurs in osteoarthritis.” Although the WISDOM study found no alleviation of symptoms of depression among the participants, other randomized trials of ERT have reported remarkable improvements in depression. Two randomized, placebo-controlled studies in which women suffering from depressive episodes received four to twelve weeks of estrogen or a placebo found a 60 to 75 percent improvement in the estrogen group versus a 20 to 30 percent improvement for women given a placebo. That estrogen has such a high rate of success in lifting depression—much better than what research has found for antidepressants and without the often unpleasant side effects of antidepressants —is tremendously important.
- Both estrogen and progesterone stimulate bone formation and inhibit bone loss, and, to date, no therapy studied has been better than ERT or HRT in preventing osteoporosis and fractures in the spine and hips. However, for estrogen to reduce the risk of fractures that occur ten to thirty years after menopause, postmenopausal women must be on HRT for at least ten years—and possibly for the rest of their lives.
- When women go off estrogen, the risk of hip fractures rapidly increases, and within six years it is where it would have been had they never taken hormones at all. In a review of eleven studies of estrogen and hip fracture published since 1990, epidemiologist Deborah Grady and her colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, found that all but one reported a reduction in the risk of hip fractures among women taking estrogen compared with non-users. Again, the longer the women had been taking estrogen—ten years or more—the lower their risk of hip fractures.
- Decades of research have demonstrated the role of estrogen in helping to preserve the cognitive ability of postmenopausal women and in decreasing the risk of Alzheimer’s.
- Drops in the female hormone, estrogen, are associated with a rise in total cholesterol levels due to higher amounts of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), the “bad” cholesterol, and another blood lipid (fat) known as triglyceride.
- Despite impressions to the contrary, cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death among women in the United States, as it is among men. However, myocardial infarction and stroke are uncommon in women until their sixth decade and beyond. Clinicians have long suspected that the delay of a decade or more in cardiovascular disease expression in women relative to men is due to the protective effects of estrogen during a woman’s reproductive years. The guidelines for estrogen therapy issued by the American College of Physicians include the statement, “Women who have coronary heart disease or who are at increased risk for coronary heart disease are likely to benefit from hormone therapy. Estrogen therapy has also been shown to reduce levels of lipoprotein(a), a lipoprotein with structural features of LDL and plasminogen, believed to be proatherogenic and antithrombolytic, that increases in plasma concentration after menopause.
- In 2020 the European Journal of Psychotraumatology did a study on the effects of estradiol and progesterone in fear and PTSD, The prevalence of PTSD in females is twice that of males and the hormones estradiol and progesterone play a huge role. The ratio between estradiol and progesterone is an important and missing variable to understand hormone influences on fear and PTSD. It was found that the ratio was important. If progesterone was found high compared to estrogen – PTSD symptoms were worse. If both hormones were low then PTSD symptoms were also exhibited.
- Dr. Kristine Ensrud and her colleagues in 2015 presented a study to the Oxford University Press to determine the effects of low dose estradiol on sleep measures in menopausal women with hot flashes. It was determined that perimenopausal and post menopausal women did better than a placebo with low dose estradiol and reduced insomnia symptoms and improved subjective sleep quality.
So we see from these studies and many others that estradiol is extremely important to our emotions, cardiovascular health, sleep, bone density, brain health, cholesterol levels, memory and so much more. If you take this key hormone away from the body… you can only experience a poorer quality of life.
Careful consideration of existing data reveals that the widespread panic over hormone therapy risks has not been remotely justified. Yet, tragically, literally millions of women today have been and continue to be denied this therapy by doctors who simply fail to study the results of the very same trial they use to lambast hormones. Results from the WHI – Women’s Health Initiative completed in the 1990’s and other studies offer no indication that HRT poses any meaningful threat when initiated early in menopause; on the contrary, it likely provides protection from chronic diseases such as breast cancer, dementia, and heart disease, in addition to its clear benefits for bone health and frailty prevention. While these data also show us that risks may increase significantly when HRT is started a decade or more after menopause onset, they do not demonstrate similar risk in continuing HRT post-menopause. So results are ambiguous.
Unfortunately, most available data (including from the WHI; women’s health initiative study completed performed in the late 1980’s – 1990’s) investigated HRT formulations which are now all but obsolete and conducted trials in which interventions lasted only a few years. Randomized trials have not been published using newer iterations like transdermal estradiol and micronized progesterone, so we can’t be sure if risks and benefits associated with older formulations apply to those most commonly used today. We also lack clinical trial data on long-term HRT use, even for the formulations used in the WHI, and such results will likely never exist due to the high costs and difficult logistics of decades-long trials.
So again, when it comes to HRT (hormone replacement therapy) or any other therapeutic intervention, there are always risks and benefits. How they balance may depend on the individual patient, but to my eyes, the scale tips in favor of HRT more often than it tips against it. The reports of health risks are dubious at best, whereas the boons to menopause symptom relief, bone health, psychological and sexual well-being, and possibly risk mitigation for chronic diseases all have the potential to increase one’s chances of living healthier, happier, and longer.
NOTE: All estrogen taken by a woman should be well balanced with progesterone whether you have a uterus or not! Progesterone is NOT just used in your uterus. There are progesterone receptors throughout your whole body just like estrogen!
Did you know low estrogen can cause micro-tears in your rotator cuff?
You see… there is a high concentration of estrogen receptors in the rotator cuff tendons – which are responsible for maintaining tendon strength and integrity.
When estrogen levels plunge, the protective effect wears off – accelerating tendon degeneration due to wear and tear.
This may cause micro-tears in the rotator cuff tendons – which can result in the following symptoms:
– Pain in the outer upper arm, front, and top of the shoulder
– Pain worsened by overhead arm movements or reaching behind the back
– Swelling and tenderness in the front of the shoulder
– “Clicking” sensation with arm movement
– Loss of strength and range of motion
This phenomenon is called Rotator Cuff tendinopathy (RCT)…
And a study found that postmenopausal women with low estrogen levels have a 48% higher risk of RCT compared to women with normal estrogen. (PMID: 34670550, PMCID: PMC8529750)
Adhesive capsulitis, also known as frozen shoulder, is an inflammatory condition characterized by shoulder stiffness and pain (PMCID: PMC10392282). Ongoing research shows hormone therapy specifically with estrogens is a promising treatment!
The point?
Those shoulder pains may not be arthritis-related (despite your GP’s insistence).
RCT is more than just a ‘poor inflammatory response’ problem or a result of aging.
It’s a LOW ESTROGEN problem.
That’s why popping painkillers, going for massages, scheduling more chiropractor visits, taking glucosamine & collagen…aren’t going to help make the pain go away in the long run.
Because all of them don’t solve the root cause: Your hormones.
The pain won’t stop unless you fix this first.
What about brain health and dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Do hormones play a part?
The frontal lobes of our brains are full of estrogen receptors! There are probably more estrogen receptors in the frontal lobes than in any other part of the brain. (In both men and women). Estrogen boosts dopamine production; higher estrogen levels correlates with increase of dopamine levels.
Post menopausal women put on estrogen (not synthetic but bio-identical natural) boosts their working memory in a study done at Berkley University.
Hormones are clearly important to brain function and memory… they work synergistically. There is still so much unknown and misunderstood when it comes to hormones and aging. Testosterone and estrogen are two key hormones that play a huge part in the prevention of dementia, Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, and overall health.
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We have in our office a formulation of estrogen that can offer a woman a solution to so many of her health concerns. One of the labs that we work closely with helped us to formulate an Estrogen transdermal cream that is in as safe as it can be amount of estradiol body cream ….
HOW TO TEST FOR ESTRADIOL
We utilize 2 main ways: Saliva hormone testing and Serum Blood testing.. For initial evaluations and to ensure we have ALL methods covered we usually suggest doing both. One shows us what is available in the body the other shows us what is reaching the target tissue.
Menopausal Women in blood we like to see it between 40-90. In saliva we want it between 4-10.
Premenopausal women levels depend on where they are in their cycles.
DUET Estrogen body cream
NOW WHAT?
Trying to decide about estrogen replacement therapy can be scary and confusing. YOU have to get educated and not just listen to one side… but consider all aspects for YOUR benefit and quality of life. We should not be scared of something GOD gave us that is necessary for so many aspects to our health. Get educated, work with a practitioner that will monitor your results (neve just take a hormone and then not test and monitor… you do need to keep a watch on them – bodies change constantly) and listen to your heart.
How to use DUET
The typical ORAL dose used is 1 to 5 mg daily, but because much of it is “dumped” by the liver immediately, this may only ultimately amount to 1⁄2 to 1 mg of estradiol actually getting into the body. That is why we prefer transdermal cream application.
Vaginal application of this cream is roughly equivalent to ESTRACE TM. Vaginal application does NOT typically cause estrogen to go systemically in high amounts throughout the body.
The normal holistic use of an Estradiol transdermal cream is one that delivers 1mg to 5 mg on a daily basis. When you deliver this to your body via a cream, it is delivered in a much steadier fashion, whereas given orally it is subject to all the variables of how the digestive system and the liver are working from hour to hour. We suggest starting with 1/8tsp (or per you holistic practitioner’s suggestion) and applied on thinned skinned areas (arms, lower legs, ankles ; think “thinned skin areas of the body). Application should be every night.
It takes roughly 2 to 2.5 weeks for estrogens to build up and do what they need in your body once you start supplementation. So give it some time to do its job.
NOTE: Make sure you are working closely with your natural health practitioner to monitor and ensure your levels are well balanced with other adrenal hormones!
Side Effects to Watch out for
“Side effects” from any natural estrogen supplementation tend to come from either underdosing or from overdosing. Natural estrogens have no “side effect” … they are natural to the body. It does take about 2.5 weeks for Estradiol to be fully activated in your body. So please ensure you don’t change the dosage for at least the first 2 to 3 weeks. If negative symptoms occur after that time, please contact your practitioner.
It would be unusual to respond directly to the active hormones because your body has been producing them naturally for many years (remember they are bio-identical).
With this in mind, you can imagine a scenario in which you might be reacting to the absolute dose vs the hormone itself.
For instance:
Using an insufficient dose will lead to the persistence of symptoms such as hot flashes, weight gain, and depression.
This does NOT mean that the medication is causing these symptoms, instead, it may mean you might need to increase your dose.
Symptoms that you are not using enough natural estrogen may include:
- Persistent hot flashes
- Persistent weight gain
- Persistent mood issues or depression
- Persistent vaginal dryness and decreased libido
- Persistent night sweats or insomnia
On the other hand, it’s also entirely possible that you are using TOO MUCH hormone and may be experiencing side effects associated with excessive dosing.
This would be an indication to cut down on your dose because excessive dosing may lead to overstimulation of estrogen receptors and may increase your risk (if continued long-term ie. months of overdosing) of breast cancer and so on.
You can find a list of excessive dosing below:
- Breast tenderness
- Menstrual bleeding
- Abdominal cramping
- Water retention or bloating
- Nipple tenderness
- Breast fullness or enlargement (with or without tenderness)
- Pelvic cramps (with or without bleeding)
- Continued hot flashes at very high doses (hot flashes may subside and then persist if dosing is extremely high)
When using estrigeb ensure that you do NOT experience the side effects listed above.
If you do, then reducing your dose (or stopping for 2-3 days) should be sufficient to bring you back to normal. The best approach to take, when using hormones, is to use the absolute minimum amount of hormone necessary to completely resolve all of your symptoms and without causing the symptoms of excess hormone.
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