Hormone Replacement: Safe or Not?

Dr. Michael Grossman explains more about hormone replacement. There has been several discussions about whether it is safe or not. Let us find out! You may view the YouTube video here.

Welcome to the age gracefully show with Dr. Michael Grossman, the well known anti aging stem cell and regenerative medicine specialist, best selling author and founder of the OC wellness clinic in Irvine, California. Each week, he shares the latest information to help you look and feel your best. So you age gracefully. And here's your host, Dr. Michael Grossman.

Hi, I'm Dr. Michael Grossman, anti aging physician. And I'm going to discuss with you today the ideas about hormones, are they safe to replace? Or are they dangerous? What does science say about the nature of hormone replacement therapy. This is something that I've been doing a lot in the last 10 years. And things have changed a lot from 20 years ago, 20 years ago, the research was showing well, hormones seem to have some good effects and bad effects. The hormones we're talking about are basically the hormones that get lower with aging. So which hormones get low with aging, the main hormones that will first focus on is estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, these hormones will get lower as we get older. So for women to go into menopause, they lose the SM progesterone and testosterone when they go into menopause. So that can happen quickly, or may happen over a period of years for women, but somewhere between the age of 45 and 55. Most women go into menopause. And that creates a lot of problems. And it created a lot of interesting research. So when the research came out, and in the year 2000 or so, the research was indicating that well, we can't tell it seems like maybe women are getting more cancer and heart disease when they take estrogen and progesterone. They had a big study with nurses 20,000 nurses study them over a bunch of years and they found that ci they are getting more cancer and heart disease. So all the physicians United States were got the memo, okay? Don't give anybody hormones, bad idea, estrogen progesterone causes cancer and heart disease. Well, over time, it became clear that the research was confusing natural estrogen and natural progesterone with synthetics. So we have synthetic progesterone, which is called progestin, like provera is a brand name of that medroxyprogesterone. And this kind of progesterone is synthetic, very potent. But it has long term side effects. It could help you if you're bleeding to death, and you're having this problem with uterine bleeding, it's so potent, it stops the bleeding, which is good. But the problem is that when you take it over a period of years, it dramatically increases the incidence of cancer and heart disease and women. Now this is very different than the effects of progesterone. The natural human progesterone is not so potent as this synthetic progestin. And it's very, very mellow. And the side effects are it helps you sleeping helps your mood, it It reduces the incidence of cancer and heart disease. So it has all these major benefits. Now, the thing about it is that there's no brand name that has an exclusive so that the drug companies don't make a lot of money on it. natural human progesterone is fairly cheap. And nobody wants to spend $200 million researching it because it's just natural. But we have a lot of good studies showing that yes, women live longer and healthier when they take this. There were two studies that came out in around 2012 which indicated that 1000 women in one study in Europe and 500 in study United States of women who use these natural hormones over a period of five or 10 years They show that they will living longer and healthier getting less cancer less heart disease than women who did nothing. And in these studies, they also use estrogen. The more natural kind of estrogens. Now as a general is a little complicated because estrogen that you take orally has a different effect than the estrogen. You take topically, when you take estrogen orally, it goes through the GI tract, it's absorbed into the liver, and processed and then it gets moved into other metabolites, some of which are not so healthy. When you take the estrogen topically either in a cream or in a patch. It has a different effect on the physiology a much more natural effect, and has beneficial effects that help you to have less cancer, less heart disease, better memory. And you also get benefits of bones being stronger, and vaginal dryness being less so there's a lot of benefits. There are some estrogens which are given orally, which don't have as many of these benefits because of the oral effects of the metabolites. And there's also these hormones that are from animal hormones that are de Premarin type hormones are from hosmer urine and they don't have as many benefits. They don't have a lot of bad side effects, but they don't have as many benefits as the natural human estrogen. So we like the natural human estrogen we like the human progesterone. Very, very helpful for women. Now let's think about testosterone. Testosterone, for men and women can be very helpful, but only if it's given topically. We find that when you take testosterone orally, which has been used for years, these are not actually human test starts on their metabolites, a little variations of human testosterone, men when you take a morling they go through the GI tract, into the liver and then metabolize into other compounds that are not so healthy for you. When you take these hormones, topically, you don't get those funny metabolites. They go through the skin enter into the into the circulation and go directly into the various cells of the body without that funny metabolism occurring first. So we find that human testosterone, not synthetics there's a lot of different synthetics that are not so good, but the human testosterone for men and women is very, very helpful. So for women, they need 1/12 of what a man needs, but they need it. They don't feel good unless they have a good amount of testosterone. So what assessed often do for women gives their muscle strength endurance brain clarity and thews. E Azzam and, and muscle stamina, and libido. So testosterone is very important for women to feel youthful. And you can use in a variety of ways topical injections, little pellets under the skin, they all have a value. For men, testosterone is so important. And there were some studies that came out originally some years ago, which said, Well, we didn't know if it was good or bad for men. Maybe they were getting some problems from it. But the studies that show there were problems were terrible studies. They did not measure testosterone level. So we don't know if they had too much or too little. They did not measure estrogen levels. When men take testosterone, some of it floats back into estrogen. The older you get, the more it does that when you take a lot of testosterone as an older person more and more estrogen is produced. And estrogen can have some negative effects and men cause them to get breast swelling and lose the benefits of testosterone. So these these studies that were done, they're not really study what these levels were too high or too low, how the estrogens were doing. They didn't measure the red blood cell levels which can go up in men who take testosterone, if it goes up too high, you can get issues like strokes. So the studies went on and on and we found that 95% of them show that testosterone makes you live longer and healthier if you're a guy depending upon the study if the study was done well They were measuring your levels. And they were watching your red blood cells and watching your estrogen levels, which is, of course, what I do all the time, we want to watch those things. So testosterone has been shown to be very effective for longevity, for reducing heart disease, for being neutral about cancer, and for helping your brain, your muscle strength and muscle stamina, endurance, and you just feel more youthful and you can be more physically active and enjoy your activity even though you're getting older. So we find that testosterone is very helpful for men and for women, as long as you're measuring these these issues that can be a part of testosterone therapy. So what are the kinds of hormones do we use for men and women? We have issues with growth hormone. as men and women get older, they lose growth hormone growth hormone is created from the pituitary gland inside the base of the brain and between the eyes. And growth hormone is so necessary for youthfulness for muscle strength and stamina through the eyes of brain clarity, skin tone, memory, libido, body fat, everything that looks like you're getting older, relates to less growth hormone. And growth hormone is not an easy thing to measure. But it pretty consistently gets younger as we get older. Now, we were using growth hormone as an injection, oh, to the year 2000 or so. And then the FDA said you can't do it anymore, because the baseball players were hitting too many home runs. And they decided to outlaw from anybody to use it the only drug in america that's outlawed, except by the package insert, which requires that you get very specialized testing to see if you're low in growth hormone. So just because you're a low ish, as you're getting older, doesn't let you use growth hormone. Growth Hormone became very expensive to use cost us like 15 $100 a month. But now we have other hormones that we can use that it's not actually a hormone, we call them releasing peptides. You can use these peptides as little injections or as little sublingual tablets under the tongue. And what the peptides do is they send a signal to your pituitary release more growth hormone. And we usually use that a bedtime because that's when you release growth hormone. And when you release the growth hormone, you feel more youthful, you feel more energetic, you feel more enthusiastic, you feel more youthful, you feel more muscle, stamina, all the things that relate to feeling youthful, get better when you take these releasing factors for growth hormone. So we find that in general, they're very safe, you cannot overdose on them, because you only can release the amount that is naturally in your body. And no matter how much you take, you're only going to release what's available to release in your body. So it's not actually growth hormones, just a releasing factor for growth hormone. So these are various types of hormones we can use as we get older. Now, hormone therapy also can include other things like thyroid, but that's pretty traditional. We know that thyroid hormone can be very helpful for people with lower thyroid, there's a lot of variations of what kind of thyroid hormone to use, but they're all helpful. And that's something that your doctor has to kind of look look through it but it's not so age related. Although generally as you get older, your thyroid will get more sluggish. So in addition, we have other hormones that we can look at. As we get older. The adrenal glands produce cortisol. As we get older, they don't necessarily get less, they may even get more. But when we have a lot of stress, the level of cortisol can go down over time, but it's not an age related phenomenon. And that's a tricky thing to replace. We can use herbs that help to increase and improve the levels of our cortisol. We can use prescription medicines to hydrocortisone is the natural type of cortisol that I like to use, but there are some value for the synthetics that are very, very potent that we use for certain situations, but for long term use too many side effects. So that's generally a big picture of hormone replacement therapy. Be and for most men and most women, looking at your hormones and considering their placement will be very effective than having you feel more useful, more energetic and extending your lifespan. So I recommend that you look at these options, consider that it could be very helpful. You can consult with me and my office, My phone number is 94922202322220232. And you can go to my website. Oh, see wellness.com has a lot of information about all these different hormones and the things that we can do to help. So I hope this is helpful for you to see the big picture of what hormone therapy can do and which hormones are healthy and we're all moms who want to try to avoid. I look forward to seeing you again. Nice talking with you.

Thank you for watching the age gracefully show with Dr. Michael Grossman. Join us next week for another informative discussion. To help you age gracefully, be sure to visit us at oc wellness.com