Are Estrogen supplements bad for older women?
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The more populations age, the more urgent it is to develop therapies to treat age-related chronic diseases. This large class of diseases represent a major and growing part of all spendings of the health care system, which, nowadays, threaten to sink Nations' economies.
Women are likely to become unable to produce estrogen after 50 years of age: that's menopause. Estrogen is lauded as the wonderful hormone which makes women more sociable — along with oxytocin — and protects them against the humiliating loss of mental faculties that disproportionately affects men. Estrogen also protects bones and many other things, because — amongst other things — it is an antioxidant.
However, nowadays, women are not advised to take Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). How come?
A 1999 preliminary paper reported
that HRT did not reduce the incidence of ischemic heart disease, and
that there was a three-fold increase in thromboembolism.
After five years, in 2002, the data and safety monitoring board recommended terminating the HRT trial because the women in that group had suffered
eight more stroke (to a total of 212) and
peripheral emboli (to 101), and seven more coronary events (to 286) than were experienced by those in the placebo group.
The adverse embolic effects were also noted in the WHIM phase of the WHI, which evaluated the mental status of women in receiving HRT or ERT, undertaken because many studies of estrogen treated postmenopausal women suggested sustained cognition, as well as the lesser occurrence of dementia than in those not estrogen-repleted.
So, too bad for the brains of our aging women ("sustained cognition (and) the lesser occurrence of dementia"), and let's throw the baby with the bathwater.
BECAUSE TODAY MEDICINE IS ABOUT EVIDENCE
NOT ABOUT THE THEORETICAL BENEFITS OF A MOLECULE, NO MATTER HOW "NATURAL" IT IS!
This was a great time for Evidence-Based Medicine. Another great exemplar: no matter what those fancy specialists say, they know nothing about the real truth, the real, empirical, F-A-C-T-S!
... those intellectuals.
The return of the theoricians
... was mostly ignored by the doxa. It's so great to get high on the paradoxes of "reality", why listen to those lofty types?
Still, some theoricians pointed out: is it so surprising to see an aging body going awry when you boost a single one of the multiple factors which are declining with age?
More precisely, researchers pointed out that estrogen is not a magic bullet: it requires, in particular, magnesium to do its work. If magnesium — which lowers with age for several reasons, including high calcium use for "strengthening the bones" — is hampered and lowered, supplemented estrogen will use it up and cause further damage.
However, this is too complex for Evidence-Based Medicine. So women can just age and decline due to lack of their estrogen, mentally and otherwise. Evidence-Based Medicine knows better.
Reference:
Benefits and Risks of Sex Hormone Replacement in Postmenopausal Women
Mildred S. Seelig, MD, Burton M. Altura, PhD and Bella T. Altura, PhD
Journal of the American College of Nutrition, Vol. 23, No. 5, 482S-496S (2004)
