Age-Proof Your Mind by Zaldy S. Tan

Author:Zaldy S. Tan [TAN, ZALDY S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446533805
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

ESTROGEN AND WOMEN’S HEALTH: THE WOMEN’S HEALTH INITIATIVE

At the center of the gender gap in Alzheimer’s disease risk is the hormone estrogen. This hormone has long been associated with feminine traits. But it may come as a surprise to some people that men also have a good amount of estrogen surging through their veins. Estrogen in men is produced in small quantities throughout life, giving them a low but constant exposure to the feminine hormone. In contrast, women’s estrogen levels are much higher but tend to fluctuate dramatically, from an abundance in puberty to a lack in menopause.

On average, women experience ovarian failure or menopause sometime between the ages of forty-five and fifty-five years. Menopause is the point in a woman’s life when her ovaries start to regress and degenerate. Estrogen that has bathed her vital organs for decades is abruptly withdrawn from her body. With the plummeting of her estrogen levels comes a corresponding increase in a woman’s risk for many diseases; coronary heart disease, cancer, stroke, and Alzheimer’s disease all become a lot more common after the onset of menopause. Doctors and scientists long suspected that this pattern was more than just coincidental. They thought that perhaps the high levels of estrogen during the reproductive period conferred protection to the body’s cells and tissues against disease, and that its sharp decline after menopause explained the dramatic surge in the incidence of these serious age-related illnesses.

After menopause, women survive with very low levels of estrogen. This state of estrogen deficiency causes some to experience bothersome symptoms such as hot flashes and vaginal dryness and compels them to take estrogen replacement therapy (ERT). For many years, ERT was the standard way of treating menopausal symptoms. But many physicians believed that apart from relieving these symptoms, ERT might actually provide other health benefits to women. They argued that restoring the circulating estrogen in postmenopausal women to the levels of their youth could help avoid many age-related diseases. Consequently, in the last couple of decades, doctors shifted their prescribing patterns from short-term estrogen replacement pills for the treatment of menopausal symptoms to long-term estrogen replacement therapy with the hope of preventing disease. Researchers saw this as an opportunity to examine the health effects of long-term ERT on women’s general health status and their vulnerability to different diseases. The prospect of ERT as a preventive measure for heart disease as well as other serious illnesses was so enticing that larger and more comprehensive trials were launched under the auspices of the U.S. government’s National Institutes of Health.

One of the largest of these federally funded clinical trials that sought to solve the estrogen puzzle was the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI). This was a set of large and well-designed clinical trials that tested the safety and efficacy of long-term estrogen replacement therapy for the prevention or treatment of diseases thought to be by-products of an estrogen-deficient state. Healthy postmenopausal women living throughout the fifty United States, with ages ranging from fifty to seventy-nine years, came in droves to volunteer for this landmark study.

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