Page 45 - What Doctors Don't Tell You - AU-NZ (February-March 2020)

SPECI

hechange was hard for Jane Dales.

ABritish expat living in Spain, she was 52 years old when she felt the full force

ofher haywire hormones in menopause. At night she tossed and turned,
hermood took tumultuous swings, and she had frequent hot flashes. Her

outlook had darkened, too. “I had no joy in anything,” Jane recalls. “I am

always a very positive person, but positivity had gone out the window. I was

putting on weight; my skin was getting thin and like crêpe paper.

My hair was falling out in handfuls. I just felt like I wanted to
crawl under a rock and hide. I was totally desperate.”

About 30 million women in the US alone are in that
phase of life, usually somewhere between ages 45 and
55, when the hallmark of their reproductive capacity,
menstruation, gradually winds down and ceases.
Estrogen, the hormone that makes fertility possible,
nurturing not just the breasts and uterus but also the brain,
bones, liver, heart and other tissues, and performing many
functions like fat and glucose metabolism, slowly declines,
as do other hormones like progesterone.
The process can take years and sometimes involves
hormone ups and downs that produce a host of
symptoms including hot flashes, vaginal dryness, poor
sleep, decreased libido and weight gain around the
middle. Frequently, it comes at a time of life when other
things are changing too—empty nests, aging parents and
realigning relationships.
Some women sail into menopause and hardly notice
the change. For others like Jane it demands their attention.
Most of the millions of women in perimenopause—the
long phase before “true” menopause when menstruation
has ceased for a full 12 months and beyond—experience
some symptoms.
If they approach their doctor, they may be prescribed
standard hormone replacement therapy (HRT)—usually
a combination of estrogen and progestogen, chemical
copies of the two most active hormones in their bodies—
which has a long, conflicting history of research findings,
the latest of which support the bad news.

Breast cancer risk
A new large-scale analysis of data from more than
half a million women, published in the prestigious
medical journal The Lancet, has confirmed that taking
pharmaceutical hormones for menopause symptoms
increases breast cancer risk. The higher the dose and the
longer the women took the drugs, the greater the risk.
What’s more, their cancer risk stayed elevated for over a
decade, even after they stopped taking the drugs. 1
This study supports the results from the landmark
2002 Women’s Health Initiative—involving more than
160,000 postmenopausal women—which showed that
conventional HRT with estrogen and progestogens
dramatically increased women’s risk of strokes, dementia
andbreastcancer. 2

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