Thursday, May 6, 2010

400 reasons you need Estrogen

You need to think about starting natural estrogen bioidentical hormone replacement therapy when approaching menopause in your late 40’s and early 50’s. Why? Well, for relief of symptoms like hot flashes, night sweats, vaginal dryness, and low libido among others, nothing works better than estrogen. Long term benefits of estrogen bioidentical replacement therapy include prevention of memory loss, maintenance of heart health, prevention of heart disease, bone production (prevention of osteoporosis), prevention of Alzheimer’s disease, prevention of cataracts and macular degeneration, maintenance of mood and prevention of depression, and quality and youthfulness of your genital tissues and skin. Vitamins and herbs cannot do all these things (although they may temporarily improve some symptoms like hot flashes). Quite simply, estrogen keeps women’s cells healthy. Only estrogen in women can prevent disease and improve quality of life…and only bioidentical transdermal estrogen!
What is natural bioidentical hormone replacement? It means using hormones that are biologically identical to what your body makes. In other words, the hormones are the same chemical structure as the ones that your body makes. Customized natural hormonal therapy is the only way to replace hormones safely. One size does not fit all.
Studies have shown that women who use hormone replacement live longer than those who do not. To be effective in preventing disease, estrogen must be started in women in their 50’s. For example, you need 10 years of estrogen replacement to help prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
Estrogen has 400 functions in your body. It increases your metabolic rate, enhances energy, improves insulin sensitivity, and regulates body temperature. It prevents muscle damage and helps maintain muscle.
In the cardiovascular arena, it helps maintain the elasticity of your arteries, dilates your small arteries, increases blood flow, inhibits platelet stickiness, decreases the accumulation of plaque on your arteries, decreases blood pressure, decreases LDL (bad cholesterol) and prevents its oxidation, acts as a natural calcium channel blocker to keep your arteries open (pharmaceutical companies make alien molecules to do this in patients with heart disease), decreases lipoprotein A ( a bad fat that is a risk factor for heart disease), reduces homocysteine (another risk factor for heart disease), increases HDL (good cholesterol) by 10 to 15%, and reduces the overall risk of heart disease by 40 to 50%.
Estrogen has many benefits for your brain and nervous system. It helps maintain your memory, increases reasoning and new ideas, helps with fine motor skills, enhances the production of nerve-growth factor, improves your mood, increases concentration, helps prevent Alzheimer‘s disease, improves your mood, aids in the formation of neurotransmitters in your brain such as serotonin which decreases depression, irritability, anxiety, and pain sensitivity.
For eye health, it protects against macular degeneration and helps prevent cataracts.
For beauty, it maintains the amount of collagen in your skin increases the water content of your skin and is responsible for its thickness and softness, improves breast firmness, maintains the moisture and thickness of the genital tissues, and decreases facial wrinkles.
For bones, it maintains bone density and helps prevent tooth loss.
It increases sexual interest and decreases your risk of colon cancer
Your body has receptor sites for estrogen everywhere: in your brain, muscles, bone, bladder, gut, uterus, ovaries, vagina, breast, eyes, heart, lungs, and blood vessels, so it is needed for health is all these areas.
So with decreased estrogen you get thinner skin, more wrinkles/aging skin, decrease in breast size, stress incontinence, oily skin, acne, decreased sex drive, decreased dexterity, increase in insulin resistance and possible diabetes, vaginal dryness, decreased memory, osteoporosis, urinary tract infections, and increased cholesterol.
Perimenopause and menopause occurs in our 40’s and 50’s. Most women of that age group can expect to live to be a mean age of 83. You may spend 30-40 years without the benefits of estrogen and experience resultant and inexorable disease and decline from loss of estrogen.
With a safe and effective way of replacing estrogen with bio-identical hormones, women no longer need to bear the disease and decline of estrogen deficiency.
A few things to remember:
1. Estrogen must be balanced with progesterone (not progestins or medroxyprogesterone which are piosons), even if you had a hysterectomy. Estrogen without progesterone or not enough progesterone equals 10 pounds. Besides, progesterone also has many benefits of itself.
2. Never take any type of oral estrogen, even bioidentical. It can cause or make cardiovascular heart disease worse due to a protein that is made in the liver when a great deal of estrogen hits the liver when absorbed from the gut. Transdermal estrogen doesn’t do that because it is absorbed more evenly.
3. Take only bioidentical estrogen that has estradiol (your main estrogen) and estriol (a weaker estrogen with cancer and heart protective effects). This compound is generally called Biest (bi-estrogen). Another bioidentical estrogen compound called Triest is now considered to be outdated since it contains estrone, another one of our week estrogens. We need a little estrone for bone health, but we do not need to replace it especially since estrone can be metabolized in the body into cancer causing metabolites.


Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com

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Thanks for joining my revolution to educate women about their hormones! Let's work together.