I found this article last week about HRT and rheumatoid arthritis risk in my online magazine …. I know a lot of US use HRT and thought this article might be of interest. I don’t have the actual magazine its online subscription… sorry.
This link might actually get you to this article!
It would be good to read the research behind the link Batty1.
Many studies indicate that HRT (notably improving oestrogen) can improve bone health in women of menopausal age.
If any members are considering HRT options, I suggest they look at Dr Louise Newson’s free Balance App, as it is useful for comparing HRT medications & giving links up to date research articles. There is also an ability to post questions.
healthunlocked.com/redirect...
I don’t have a link it’s an online magazine subscription I have …. I added a link that was posted on bottom of article this might help .
Little snippets like that in magazines won't have medical papers backing it up. It's a rubbish piece to scare us as usual. As Buddy195 said, use Dr Louise Newson's Balance app or her copious web site for up to date evidence based facts on HRT usage. Having been a patient at her clinic for years now I can safely say I've never heard anything about rheumatoid arthritis and HRT in the same breath.
Mum has serious amounts of both athritis and has never touched HRT, mores-the-pity as she would have benefited from it greatly in other ways.
Appreciate you sharing! I have other priorities before tackling possibly HRT, but am still early in discovery and still in the fence - ie, all the folks here who swear by it and then others who say it wasn’t for them!
I have been on HRT for 20 years I don’t blame it for my Psoriatic Arthritis … I do blame thyroid disease though.
When I asked my gynecologist about it
The first question she asked was - were you ever on the pill, how’d you do, because HRT is the same but in lower doses.
My 17 year old daughter is horrified at the prevalence of the pill in teenage girls. Because of what she hears from some about how hormones can wreak havoc on a girls body.
As a parent, I’m horrified as there’s an automatic presumption that teenagers are sleeping around … but that’s another topic entirely.
But as someone who never thought twice at 17 when my doctor put me on the pill for supposed iron anemia… and I was on it for 10+ years on and off.
I do wonder, ie I haven’t done my research yet, about exactly how good or bad it would be for me. What’s stopping me now is that I just need to optimize my Free Ts and vitamins/ minerals first.
I can't separate thyroid and HRT. I have to have both reasonable to work on the other. HRT is not the same as the pill, for a start all "pill" products are synthetic, there are not body identical versions that I'm aware of. And the balance is totally different as well as dose being much lower.
I was trundling along badly on Levo for years before getting proper HRT going and it was transformative in many ways. An avid reader all my life I had stopped reading. Everything was grey. There was no joy in life anymore and I was miserable. It was so easy to waste whole days lots in gloom. HRT changed all that and gave me the strength and hope to really focus on my thyroid status/medications.
I think I’ve read your experience before, and stories like this keep it top if mind. I’m still in the early days of my Levo/Lio so not quite ready to use my next dose change in HRT. But we will see!
That being said, I asked my gyno about the “bio identical” thing… she said “it’s just marketing, it means nothing.” I asked three more times every which way and she just said “nope, just marketing.” However they are different is not empirically or objectively better or worse for us, she said. I have no opinion or position on it, as I still know little.
I took terrible notes but wrote something like:
Estrogen
birth control pill is 20 mcg
hrt 0.5 mcg or .25 patch
Progesterone
Pill 3 mcgs
HRT Promethium 100 mg progesterone
I know that there are different balances of pill options and if course HRT varies for everyone.
But that’s what my doctor said, that it’s like the pill but whereas the pill has a lot more to be enough to prevent pregnancy, HRT just needs a lot less for menopause symptoms.
I guess it was an ok introduction- ie, just estrogen and progesterone.
I hope to be able to consider it in the next few months. Have to get my Free Ts one notch better, and fix my ferritin first.
I suspect you are American? By your use of the term gyno. Sadly gynochologists are not menopause or HRT experts most of the time, I only know of one in the UK. They are little better at it an GPs from what I have seen. Yours is ludicrous to say that the only difference between bio and prescription is marketing.
We don't use the term bio identical in the UK, we call it body identical and for us these preparations are available on NHS prescriptions. The difference between bio and body identical seems to be that bio products are mixed up in a compounding pharmacy, which is much more common in the US to the UK. But a compounded product is not as regulated in strength etc as a standardised medication. And they can't achieve higher doses using creams. The cream becomes saturated with compound powder and won't operate as a cream so you can't have large doses.
I have personally tried both. When I started HRT my GP admitted to knowing nothing so I went to a private clinic. There were not many about then and I got fitted out with bio compounded products at great expense. They didn't help me. I could not get it right.
Time moved on, more clinics appeared and Dr Louise Newson rose to prominence. I've been at her clinic for years now and it's like night and day between a GP, or the first clinic I went to, and going to the Newson Clinic. They really know their stuff at Newson. And everything they prescribe for us can then be picked up and continued on the NHS via our GPs.
We all need different strengths of oestrogen replacement depending on our bodies. There is no one size fits all to HRT. I found that gel oestrogen gave me a fast hit and wore off too soon in the day. I would apply it, drip with sweat, calm down about an hour later and have run out and felt totally drained by about 7pm. Patches were a bit similar for me, but slower as they remain on the body for 3 days. But I felt very different when I applied a fresh patch to how I felt when I removed it 3 days later. I then tried the Lenzetto spray oestrogen, which I really like. It's gentle but does the job. But we could not get my oestrogen level high enough to protect me without using silly numbers of sprays and I seemed to absorb them differently depending on all sorts of other factors. So I then tried Bijuve capsule. This little beauty is the first combination body identical oestrogen and body identical progesterone HRT on the market. I take it at night and it's quietly getting on with the job. No ups and downs or variations. We still had an issue with levels being low (Bijuve is only 1mg oestrogen which is a low dose) so I accompany it with 2 sprays of the Lenzetto in the morning and I finally feel stable in my HRT.
Patches come in 25, 50, 75 and 100mcg. Spray is supposed to be around 25mcg per spray. Gel is 25mcg per pump. Often we need to mix and match and quite often we need to go over the recommended dosage to get the benefit. I have dry hypothyroid skin and I really think that affected the gel and patch and to some extent the spray absorption. I know of people wearing 2 x 100mcg patches and others using 6 or 7 pumps of gel a day. I could not be doing with all that gel, waiting for it to dry. But at least this should help you to realise there is a lot more variation out there than 2 pumps of gel a day or a 25 or 50mcg patch. Those are low doses and some of us need more. I'm not far off 6ft tall and I'm heavy due to the hypothyroidism so I need more oestrogen than a small petite slim woman would. But if her skin didn't absorb well, she could end up using as much as me just to get the lower benefit she needed.
I don't think you will get very good HRT care from your gynochologist I'm afraid. You need to find someone else. That might be something a functional doctor can do? Or an interested GP. But avoid the compounded products if you can. Always aim for body identical. The only body identical progesterone there is is called Utrogestan. Nothing else is actual progesterone, they are all synthetic progestins.
🤗 Well that’s my required reading for the day!💕
Oh how I love this forum. Thank you for your knowledge, wisdom, and for the time you took to write that. I’m kinda choked up right now with a tear in my eye, not gonna lie! Where would I be without you guys.
Thank you!
Ha ha, don’t be upset. I love to share. I’ve learnt a lot because I enjoy getting to grips with these things and read/talk/watch everything that I can. Also, I talk a lot when I’m enthusiastic!
Hey FancyPants54 !
Would you say a necessary and helpful furst step is to get a blood test for my sec hormones done?
I want to, but not sure if you think it’s helpful. How often do you get your sex hormones tested?
Like… is there a way to support my hypothesis that perimenopause is contributing to my symptoms? Even if it isn’t now, will a baseline of blood results be useful later?
Also - Bijuve website shows the usual warnings… but this one says PROBABLE dementia 😦 I’ve never seen “probable” in a warning. Thoughts on risks!
It's difficult for blood tests to show you much of any use once you hit the perimenopause phase because hormones ricochet all over the place during this time. It's the biggest upheaval of all, leading to big mood swings. Menopause itself is just the final loss. It stops swinging at that point. I have my hormone levels checked once a year now. But it works out that I get them tested about 3 times a year. Once for the menopause clinic, but I see a private endo twice a year for my hypothyroidism and he puts them on the blood test list for some reason so I get extra sneak peaks. They are useful to show ballpark levels but that's all. You should go on symptoms and whether, if you try HRT you feel better.
As to Patient Information Leaflets for drugs, I take those with a large pinch of salt. Ass covering is all they are. They will list every last thing and then they won't change that PiL for decades because it costs money to do so.
How can restoring your own lost hormones with identical hormones "probably" cause dementia? That's not how probability works. Dementia is linked to the loss of the hormone oestrogen in women. Not into replacing it like for like. Avoid those bits of paper. If you took them all to heart you would never take another pill in your life and for nothing.
My 17 year old daughter is horrified at the prevalence of the pill in teenage girls. Because of what she hears from some about how hormones can wreak havoc on a girls body.
There are girls/women who go on the pill because they have horrendous period pain. Since doctors always assume that females of any age are exaggerating their pain or are drug-seeking, getting the pill to stop my periods altogether was the only choice I was ever given. But at the time doctors didn't know whether this was safe (we're talking about 40 years ago, so rules and ideas may have changed). I was told to take two packets consecutively and then stop taking them to force me to have a period. Those periods were always absolute hell.
Here in the US, maybe there too, they would also recommend at times taking two packs in a row WITHOUT a break if there was a special occasion where you didn't want to get your period (like your wedding.)
For me - now looking back, which is exactly what happens now - that typical "one iron test, 3 months supplements, serum iron goes up, doctor says stop taking iron supplements, then never tests again." But sure - put a 17 year old on the pill without one bit of education or warning about any of it.
Yeah, I was never given any education either. One of the earliest pills I went on had an extremely high dose of oestrogen in it, and I didn't realise this was weird. By the time I was running out I had moved and went to a different doctor. She asked me what I'd been taking and almost fell off her chair when I told her. She was appalled that a teenager had been prescribed them.
"one iron test, 3 months supplements, serum iron goes up, doctor says stop taking iron supplements, then never tests again."
That summarises my experience almost exactly! Except it wasn't serum iron they tested it was haemoglobin to see if I was anaemic. But I'm one of many who can become iron deficient but not become anaemic until a long, long time later.
Once I discovered I could test and treat my own iron/ferritin deficiency without requiring a doctor or a prescription my life improved immensely. I spent nearly two years raising my ferritin to mid-range (serum iron stayed low), then I spent five years maintaining it.
It was only after that seven years that my serum iron started to rise above rock bottom, and when I was happy enough with both ferritin and serum iron I stopped supplementing. I still test an iron panel twice a year.
I’ve taken a look at the article, website etc and there is a complete lack of any description of anything as far as I can see. I would be wary of using their advice!
I would take that article with a large dose of salt , I used to get the wddty magazine and there were contradictory articles even in the same publication. Good HRT (and the good bit is very important) simply replaces what was there pre menopause. Young people with plenty hormones don’t get arthritis?
Stress is a factor in autoimmune diseases, and we peri/menopausal women are living stressed out lives.
Menopausal women in the UK facing severe HRT shortage
self-treating hypothyroidism and Definitely Already had Rheumatoid Arthritis
Vagus Nerve Stimulation for depression, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Crohns, epilepsy
Levothyroxine and HRT
Menopause/HRT Question. 
