Progesterone is heart protective

I found the article below to be extremely interesting and thought that it might prompt some discussion. Interestingly, I use progesterone and if I try to drop my dose or cycle it I will experience a-fib.

[raypeat.com]

My Dr. started me on progesterone last month. He wanted me to take it every day.
I do feel better on it.
Dee

Progesterone is the part of hormone replacement therapy that causes the health problems associated with HRT. It was not singled out, as it should have been, in the results reported in the last studies on HRT. Premarin is the good, beneficial hormone.

My Ob/gyn head of the service at Brigham and Womens in Boston is adamant about not prescribing progesterone.

Carol

Carol:

Bioidental progesterone is a completely different chemical structure. One of the problems with the HRT progesterone (and it shouldn't have even been called progesterone) was that it lowered testosterone levels below where a normal post-menopausal womens levels should have been. So that being said we are not even talking about the same thing.

In addition, my endo. recently commented that she thought the new news about progesterone (which as rehashed from the WHO study) was just the pharamaceutical companies' way of trying to benefit from a different angle...sorry I can't quite remember if it was to scare people away from bios or something to do with a new product they are offering.

Incidently, neither my endocrinologist nor my obgyn feels that there is any danger in using bioidentical progesterone.

I am sure that any dept. head at a big hospital is going to be marching in lock-step with big pharama. Sorry, but that is my personal opinion.

Hi:

I have been taking bio-identical hormones for the last 6 years, my doctor is Dr. Brownstein, a holistic doctor. I have a check up twice a year for my hormones. I am with you on this Lyn.

Carol: I don't understand your comment that "Premarin is the good hormone", forgive my ignorance but I thought Premarin was the name of the HRT which is taken from horse urine, how is that a good hormone?

Liz

Liz,

Seems like you are trotting out that old horse. Forgive the pun.

Lots of parmaceuticals and products are derived/distilled from sources that one would consider repugnant or "distasteful." That doesn't mean that they are not compatable with or bad for humans.

Carol

Lyn -thank you for that response. Bioidentical hormones are the safe ones. I've been using bioidentical hormones for 20 years.

Jackie

Lyn -

You said: "I am sure that any dept. head at a big hospital is going to be marching in lock-step with big pharama. Sorry, but that is my personal opinion."

That is simply not true. He was one of the few MD's who were highly critical of the results from the first nurses study. He felt that the study had been halted too soon, that the media went crazy reporting it and he recognized when few others did, that premarin was the problematic hormone and that premarin was good for women. That has now turned out to be true.

The last time I looked in the mirror I didn't see a plant. I know that this isn't very "PC," but why are plants more compatable with humans when we are animals?

Carol

Carol - You've got to look at all sides of this issue and know all the facts.

Check out what Christiane Northrup MD says on this topic……[www.drnorthrup.com]

[www.nih.gov] -
hormone therapy as it relates to heart risks

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was part of a large set of clinical trials called the Women's Health Initiative (WHI). The HRT portion of the study was ended 3 years early because of a small but unacceptable increase in the rate of breast cancer among the women taking a combination of 0.625 mg of estrogen plus 2.5 mg of progestin daily. As the WHI data has been analyzed, risks of blood clots, heart disease, ovarian cancer, and dementia have also been identified. Experts do not yet know whether lower-dose, shorter-term HRT reduces or eliminates these risks.

It's been more than a decade since Dr. Jonathan Wright introduced the concept of bio-identical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT) with the book Natural Hormone Replacement for Women Over 45 (Wright JVW, Morgenthaler J. Smart Publications, 1997), at a time when only a handful of clear thinking, knowledgeable doctors had ever heard about bio-identical hormones. Many women first learned the truth about HRT and BHRT from that first book; others later heard about it from TV celebrity Suzanne Somers, who described her personal experiences with a different version of BHRT in the first of a series of books.

But the real stampede away from HRT and toward BHRT began in 2002 with the premature termination of a large, government-funded study-the Women's Health Initiative (WHI)-the results of which confirmed that the risks of conventional HRT unquestionably outweighed its benefits.

In their new updated book, /Stay Young & Sexy with Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement: The Science Explained/, authors Wright and Lenard have brought to light many examples of forgotten or ignored scientific studies combined with up-to-date clinical experience that provide solid support for the safety and benefits of BHRT.

[www.amazon.com]

Carol:

It is not a question of whether plants are better than horses. It is the end product that matters. The chemical structure of premarin is different from the chemical structure of our estrogen. The same with the progesterone they used in conjunction with the premarin...different chemical structure from our own progesterone.

This was done so that the pharamaceutical companies could patent them.

When we use bio-identical hormones we are putting hormones into our body that are identical to our own. That is why they can't be patented. Things that occur in nature cannot be patented.

My comment about the dr. was simply based on my own experience with a major medical center in my area. Their drs. are strictly following the protocol and party-line of the pharma companies and clearly don't do much thinking for themselves. I believe that a lot of the larger hospitals get research funding from the pharmas. and really parrot the pharma. companies point of view on many issues.

Lyn,

My ob gyn thinks outside the box and was skeptical of the Women's Health Initiative when it was abruptly halted - for whatever reason. If it had not been stopped it would have proven long ago that progesterone was the problem.

"When we use bio-identical hormones we are putting hormones into our body that are identical to our own. That is why they can't be patented. Things that occur in nature cannot be patented."

Always the skeptic, I say "Prove that plant hormones are "bio identical" to our own."

Why are hormones from horse's "unnatural" and hormones from plants "natural?"

Carol

Carol - take the time to understand that there are plant based hormones and then the true bioidentical hormones... Read the link I provided by Northrup... so your arguments are founded in fact.

Compounding pharmacies make the True Natural Bioidentical Hormones and are available by Rx only.

excerpt...

Our hormones are comprised of a solid steroid base (yes—cholesterol!), decorated with "arms," "legs," and "tails" pinned on here and there. These attachments are what turn hormones into specialized molecules, allowing them to plug in to receptor molecules throughout the body, turning on and off much of the cellular behavior that makes us tick.

Pretty slick! Bioidentical hormones are those whose biochemical structure exactly duplicates those found "naturally" in the human body—that is, the ones whose structure has evolved for millenia. Why mess with a good thing?

True Natural Hormones

The molecules naturally produced in the human female body for which we most often seek replacement include the following: a) the three basic types of estrogen: estrone (E1), estradiol (E2), and estriol (E3); b) progesterone; c) testosterone and d) DHEA, an adrenal precursor to testosterone. These truly "natural" hormones are available by prescription (or, in the case of progesterone and DHEA, over-the-counter in low doses), and can also be readily titrated to a woman’s individual needs. Though many health care practitioners are still not trained in prescribing them, the opportunity is there for them to learn, and health care providers are becoming increasingly aware of their patients’ preferences

Jackie

Well you may be right with your "facts," but I am afraid that I have been put off by a bias directed against big business/ capitalist profit running through this discussion. ("Big Pharma" rhetoric)

Of course it is easy to forget that because they deal in so-called "natural" ingredients that supplement manufacturers and merchandisers, as well as alternative practitioners are also big business.

Carol

Carol:

It is not a question of being for or against big business. My issue with the pharmaceutical industry (whose revenues in the trillions dwarfs the supplements industry) is that they have an unfair advantage. Our medical community essentially functions as their marketing arm, they greatly influence the education that md's are given in this country and are not properly regulated because there is much collusion between them and the FDA.

This is not true capitalism. And it is something we all need to keep in mind when making health care choices. We need to be informed consumers and do our own research because what is presented by the media is often not fact and busy drs. often rely on pharmaceutical reps for the latest info on meds and research.

I will close by saying that this thread was never intended to be a debate over hormones. It is about progesterone and the role it may play in preventing a-fib. When I have more time I will restart this discussion on the a-fib board and hopefully it will not digress into a similar debate.