WHY USE HORMONE REPLACMENT THERAPY IF YOU ARE MENOPAUSAL?
Dr Steven R. Goldstein MD is a Menopause Specialist in NYC and a Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at New York University School of Medicine. Dr Goldstein is also a past President of the International Menopause Society, a Certified Menopause Practitioner and a Past President of the North American Society.
One of Dr Goldstein’s patients who was in menopause said “I feel pretty good. I am two years into menopause, I eat right and I exercise, and except for the fact that I don’t menstruate, I can’t tell the difference. Why should I take any drug?”
Realize that there is a difference between taking medication for relief of menopausal symptoms (like hot flashes, insomnia, night sweats etc.) and the concept of taking a drug for health maintenance and prevention of disease.
Women who are postmenopausal will lose bone. This is because Estrogen helps to inhibit the resorption of bone. Bone is a dynamic organ. For your entire life you are constantly laying down new bone cells and resorbing old
bone cells. After menopause the rate of resorption is greater than the rate of new bone. So all women will lose bone. By age eighty, women will have osteoporosis as defined by the World Health Organization.
In addition, estrogen is known to lower cholesterol. Even if you have no problem with cholesterol when you are making estrogen, your cholesterol will be higher without estrogen as you enter and go through menopause.
Women who are pre-menopausal have a fraction of the heart attacks of men because of the presence of estrogen. After menopause, those who do not go on hormone replacement therapy catch up in terms of incidence of heart attacks relatively quickly. Thus, there are tremendous benefits to having an estrogenic function for your entire life.
During menopause you no longer make estrogen because the ovaries have become quiescent. The concept of a drug that will give you the estrogenic function – in terms of preventing bone loss and lowering cholesterol, thus reducing heart disease without any risks – is very tempting, and a very exciting concept of health maintenance.
Dr Goldstein, a HRT Specialist NYC, and co author of the book “The Estrogen Alternative” prescribes hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to help patients in his practice cope with menopause. The type of HRT used is Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulators (SERMs). This class of drugs has undergone clinical trials, is FDA approved and used by millions of women across the world. They are estrogen blockers in the breast to guard against breast cancer.
If you are a woman concerned with your bone health as you enter menopause, or if you are post-menopausal, then perhaps a consultation with Dr Steven R. Goldstein, a Menopause Specialist NYC is in order.