Health Program | News, Views and Reviews on Health Issues

There are a lot of baby boomers living in the United States who are females. In fact, in 2006, the oldest of the baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964 began turning 60 years old. There were an estimated 78.2 million baby boomers, as of July 1, 2005, and 50.8 percent of them were women. That means according to projections 7,918 people turned 60 each day in 2006, or about 330 every hour. (Source: US Census Bureau)

This is the main reason why there are so many women today who are experiencing menopause symptoms. If you are one of more than 40 million women feeling discomfort from menopause, then you need to know the facts.

Just exactly what is menopause? It can be defined as the cessation of menstruation for 12 consecutive months. Menopause marks the end of a woman’s reproductive years, and usually occurs naturally around age 51 or 52 when the ovaries stop producing estrogen.

A women can experience immediate menopause at any age when her ovaries are surgically removed. But in either case, the symptoms of menopause affect women’s health, mental state of mind, and quality of life for the remainder of her lifetime.

It was the year 2003 when the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) scared women and doctors alike with the warning not to take hormones. Most women don’t know the real facts about the WHI. The results comprehensively discussed cardiovascular disease, cancer and osteoporosis in women over 65 years-old on PremPro and Premarin only. Bio-identical hormone therapy was not part of the WHI study.

The WHI was established to address the most common causes of death, disability, and impaired quality of life in postmenopausal women. It was an organized attempt to correct the inequities in women’s health research and therefore provide practical information to women and their doctors. The WHI focused on synthetic hormone replacement therapy, dietary patterns plus calcium and Vitamin D supplements and their effects on the prevention of heart disease, cancer, and osteoporosis. The reason being because the incidence of these three diseases increases after a woman reaches menopause.

Approximately nine million American women were still taking some form of Premarin in November of 2003. One of them is PremPro. Another one, Premarin® means Pregnant Mares’ Urine (PREgnant MARes’ urINe); PMU for short. These are both synthetic hormones.

Then the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) results came out. There was a reduction of 25 percent of the approximately 12 million women taking PMU based medications in 1999.

About a third of the fifty-five million post menopausal women in the United States are on synthetic estrogen replacement therapy (ERT), or hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Of these women, about 49 percent currently use “PMU” based products, which is down from a high of 79 percent in 1999.

There are still many women who do not understand hormone therapy, and for those women who are afraid, and still do not take any Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), the idea of natural bio-identical hormones is becoming more intriguing. And with so many products on the market, even that has become confusing. Plus the government continues to try to regulate all of the bio-identical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT) remedies that are being sold.

Women no longer need to be confused about hormone replacement therapy. People have become accustomed to talking about bio-identical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT) in menopause medicine. But this terminology isn’t truly accurate because hormones are not really bio-identical. Natural hormones are not bio-identical unless the body can recognize them as hormones, and they are not considered restoration unless what has been lost is truly restored. They can be mimicked, but they are not identical. Furthermore, they cannot be replaced, rather they can be restored.And in oder for hormone therapy to be truely accurate, it must be rhythmic, or biomimetic.

How how do biomimetic hormones differ from bio-identical hormones? Biomimetic hormones are derived from natural sources, and mimic in the body the natural undulating rhythms of the hormone blood levels in a normal menstrual cycle. Undulating means to cause to move in a smooth wavelike motion.

Bio-identical hormone products are usually formulated from plant sources to match the chemical structure of hormones produced naturally by the human body. The premise is that, technically, the body can’t distinguish bio-identical hormones from the ones the female ovaries produce; however, different forms of human-produced hormones are recognized differently by cells. it makes sense that bio-identical hormone effects might also be different.

For bio-identical hormone compounds to be authentically the same, biologically, as human hormones, they must be presented biomimetically. A great part of recognition at the receptor cite depends on presentation, i.e…serum levels and timing, as well as molecular structure.

Biomimetic hormone restoration therapy is accurate, it’s biomimetic and mimics the up and down rhythms of hormone blood levels in a normal menstrual cycle. That’s Biomimetic – not bio-identical.

What is the rhythm? The body’s rhythms are governed by a master clock that works much like a conductor. It strikes up one section of the body’s orchestra as another quiets down, taking its main cue from light signals in order to stay in sync with the 24-hour day. Our body’s hormones surge and ebb to this maestro’s wand.

What is known as the circadian clock in our cells measures one 24 hour spin of the planet. For 28 days the moon tracks the repeating of that cycle – and so does your body. There is only one patented bioidentical hormone product on the market that uses this natural rhythm of nature to establish the proper doses of estradiol and progesterone that mimic the natural hormones produced by your body. The topical creams and their amounts vary throughout the 28 day cycle to restore the hormone levels of youth.

The latest treatment for women in menopause is multi-phasic rhythmic dosing of bio-mimetic hormone replacement therapy (BHRT) using natural hormones in a bio-mimetic way. More than two million women in the U.S. use customized hormones for menopause symptoms.

In the future there will be 57.8 million baby boomers living in 2030, according to projections; 54.9 percent would be female. That year, boomers would be between ages 66 and 84. Thanks to the relief of the rhythm of Biomimetic Hormone Replacement Therapy (BHRT), hopefully they will all live more happily.