More bad news about hormones

Any boomer or zoomer (an awful term, by the way, that sounds more like a toy car than a senior getting ready for retirement rates at the cinema) can verify that you simply are not the same swinging bag of hormones at 50 or 60 that you were at 15 or 16 (and thank god for that, I say), mostly because your sex-related hormones levels  plunge as you age.

We all know, of course that in women, estrogen and progesterone levels plummet at menopause, and although they don’t drop as quickly, testosterone levels do drop slowly and gradually in men as we age.

The thing that really bothers me, though, is that despite our lack of evidence that we actually know what we’re doing when we “replace” such hormones, or more accurately, when we try to increase sex-related hormone levels via artificial cocktails of pills or creams, there are still lots of medical people who argue that that’s exactly what we should be doing for everyone who’s aging, that is, raising their sex-related hormone levels over the years.

Why?

Because hey, those levels were once higher, that’s why, which is the same stupid reasoning, of course that people are using these days to buy stocks that have plunged in value: hey, those stocks must be worth more because they were once valued much more highly.

Oh ya? Says who?

The really frustrating thing, though, is that most of the data points in the other direction, that is, taht we are actually doing way more harm than good by giving people, especially menopausal women, these artificial hormone cocktails.

Thus, a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine a few weeks ago concluded that the use of all variants of HRT in women at all ages raises the risk of strokes, and a study just presented at a major symposium on breast cancer proved conclusively that the risk of breast cancer is doubled in women who use HRT for long enough, although happily, that risk starts to drop as soon as a woman gives up her hormones.

Hormone replacement is a highly problematic type of “therapy” and should be used only with extreme caution, if at all.