LifeCare Chiropractic

The Best Chiropractic Care in Mesa, Arizona

Hormone

Early Onset of Puberty in Girls Still a Mystery – (02-19-01)

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Early Onset of Puberty in Girls Still a Mystery

A mystery to whom? Add estrogen-mimicking hormones to the environment (called xenoestrogens), give all sorts of growth-stimulating hormones to cows so they can mass produce milk, increasing rates of obesity (fat cells are a source of estrogen), destroy the GI’s normal flora (certain unfriendly flora unconjugate estrogen in the gut, essentially thumbing their bacterial noses at the liver’s attempt to get rid of the estrogen via the bile) and store everything possibly edible in plastic or vinyl (believed to act as a xenoestrogen) and the “mystery” is solved.

(article) Scientists have known for several years that girls and boys are reaching puberty earlier than in the past, but they still do not know why this is happening, or what the consequences might be, experts said at a forum here Monday sponsored by the Environmental Media Services. A study of 17,000 girls, reported in the journal Pediatrics in 1997, found that the average starting age of puberty among white girls had dipped a year from previous studies, to 9.7 years. African-American girls were found to reach puberty even earlier, at an average age of about 8, according to Dr. Marcia E. Herman-Giddens, the principal investigator and a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Data on when puberty starts has been skimpy over the years — especially for African Americans. Still, Dr. Herman-Giddens said at the forum, “I am confident that this trend is a real trend,” adding that adolescence seems to be starting earlier and lasting longer in children worldwide. She is currently analyzing data on US boys. “What we’re seeing is a symptom of a very serious public health problem,” said Dr. Herman-Giddens, noting that the long-term physical and mental health effects of early puberty are not understood. Among the potential causes she mentioned are obesity or overweight, genetics, low birthweight, poor diet, lack of activity, and, surprisingly, an absentee father or a nonrelative male in the house. Scientists have also been exploring whether so-called endocrine disrupters — a group of chemicals thought to interfere with hormonal function — might be spurring or delaying puberty, Dr. Herman-Giddens noted. Dr. John Peterson Myers, director of the W. Alton Jones Foundation and author of a book on chemical contamination and fetal development, said that some of these chemicals have retarded sexual development in rat fetuses. Among the most controversial of these chemicals are phthalate esters, which are found in toys, vinyl flooring, detergents, and cosmetics and lotions. The science is not certain, but there is a plausible link, contends Dr. Myers. On Wednesday the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association released a statement noting that phthalates are widely used and have been favorably reviewed by the US Food and Drug Administration, the US Environmental Protection Agency, “and other scientific bodies in Europe, North America and Japan.” Dr. Diana Zuckerman, executive director of the National Center for Policy research for Women and Families, said that she worries about the psychological impact of early puberty on young girls. She explained that studies have shown that girls who develop at a young age begin dating earlier, have sex sooner, are subject to more psychological stress and behavior problems, and are more likely to drink and smoke. “No matter what they look like, they are still little girls,” she said. Dr. Zuckerman added that early puberty places stress on parents, who have to explain sexuality when their child is young.

Effect of long-term changes in diet and exercise on plasma leptin – (02-08-01)

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Effect of long-term changes in diet and exercise on plasma leptin

Leptin is one of the newly discovered hormone that is related to weight control in the body. Adipose tissue produces most of the body’s leptin, and with high levels (as with insulin) it is believed that the body becomes resistant to the leptin, and it loses its ability to bring body weight down. This study shows that leptin levels are reduced by exercise. This is not a surprise, but adds further importance to the recommendation for exercise in any lifestyle improvement.

AJCN — Abstracts: Reseland et al. 73 (2): 240

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Preprandial Rise in Ghrelin Levels Suggests a Role in Meal Initiation – (08-06-01)

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Preprandial Rise in Ghrelin Levels Suggests a Role in Meal Initiation

I don’t have much to say on this issue at this time. The hormone ghrelin is a newly discovered hormone and may show to play a role in weight management and appetite. Considering the fact that we just discovered a new hormone, does anyone out there feel comfortable about taking drugs that alter appetite in an attempt at weight management? We have no idea what the long term impacts are on messing with this process. I’m sure that as research on ghrelin progresses, we will find that it has impacts on other body systems, much like where we were with leptin several years ago.

Diabetes — Abstracts: Cummings et al. 50 (8): 1714

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Premenstrual Drop in Progesterone May Explain Perimenstrual Asthma – (06-11-01)

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Premenstrual Drop in Progesterone May Explain Perimenstrual Asthma

I must admit that the idea of using progesterone to treat asthmatic complaints is new to me, it would be something I would be very comfortable with. Progesterone is already an excellent tool to use to blunt the high estrogen levels that may lead to many other menstrual and premenstrual problems.

Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand’s annual scientific meeting In a prospective study of 51 women with asthma, 47% had constant symptoms, 41.2% had perimenstrual asthma, and 11.8% had mid-cycle deterioration in peak expiratory flow and other signs, according to respiratory physicians Dr. Glenn Rice-McDonald, from Mater Misericordiae Hospital in South Brisbane, and Professor Charles Mitchell, from Princess Alexandra Hospital in Woolloongabba. “The magnitude of the drop in progesterone from day minus 7 to day minus 2, premenstrual tension symptoms, and age explained 89.2% of the variability in perimenstrual asthma symptom scores, with the progesterone gradient being the major determinant,” the researchers reported in a meeting abstract.

Lifespan extension in mice with defects in growth hormone production – (06-11-01)

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Lifespan extension in mice with defects in growth hormone production

I realize that this is a rodent study, but the implications are so strong if they hold true for humans (as I believe they will…). One of the current fads in lifespan extension is the use of hormones to bring levels up to those found in youth. What we may not realize is that nature intended for those levels to drop as we got older to protect our aging cells. This study highlights this belief to the “T”.

PNAS — Abstracts: Flurkey et al. 98 (12): 6736

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DHEA May Be Effective Treatment for Female Sexual Dysfunction – (06-21-01)

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DHEA May Be Effective Treatment for Female Sexual Dysfunction

In using salivary analysis to check for hormone levels (saliva checks for the free forms of hormones, not the ineffective protein bound forms that most bloodwork checks for…) as an assay for adrenal gland function, cortisol and DHEA levels are checked. In patients under chronic stress, the body will actually steal the building blocks to make more cortisol, leaving none to make DHEA. Now, considering that DHEA is the precursor to testosterone and estrogen, this creates a problem. This article shows benefits of using DHEA in women with sexual dysfunction. Personally, I would check adrenal function first. By addressing this problem, DHEA levels can rise without ever administering DHEA itself.

96th annual meeting of the American Urological Association Dehydroepiandosterone (DHEA) may serve as an effective treatment for women with androgen deficiency syndrome leading to sexual dysfunction, according to a study released at the 96th annual meeting of the American Urological Association in Anaheim, California.Irwin Goldstein, MD, and colleagues from Boston University School of Medicine administered DHEA to 32 patients. After 6-12 months of receiving 50 mg of DHEA daily, all of the women reported improved scores both on the Female Sexual Function Index and the Sexual Distress Scale.Use of the adrenal androgen steroid as therapy for sexual dysfunction remains controversial, however, because there is a lack of specific criteria for diagnosis of female androgen deficiency syndrome.Until now, women with sexual dysfunction and a serum-free testosterone concentration in the lower third of the normal range have been considered for androgen replacement therapy. The syndrome is associated with loss of libido, low motivation, and fatigue, most often occurring in women who have undergone oophorectomy or are postmenopausal. A lack of objective measures for gauging symptoms such as blunted motivation, however, as well as low assay sensitivity in the lower concentrations of androgen seen in women after iatrogenic menopause have hampered clinicians’s abilities to reach consensus on the definition and classification of the syndrome.

Latest HERS Report Links HRT to Increased Risk for Urinary Incontinence – (05-20-03)

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Latest HERS Report Links HRT to Increased Risk for Urinary Incontinence

I’m starting to think that maybe I’ll try this stuff!! Increases risk of heart disease and breast cancer, doesn’t improve quality of life, most commonly derived from horse urine and now we find that it increases risk of urinary incontinence!! Who wouldn’t want all these “benefits” I’m scratching my head trying to figure out why this stuff is still on the market, and, even more unbelievably is still in demand. I would think market forces would have driven this product into oblivion by now, but not so…

ACOG 51st Annual Clinical Meeting: Abstract 10S. Presented April 29, 2003 Women with a history of cardiovascular disease (CVD) who take estrogen plus progestin may have a significantly higher rate of urinary incontinence than women who don’t take the hormones, according to the latest analysis from the Heart and Estrogen/Progestin Replacement Study (HERS) investigators.”And the risk increases with length of treatment, so women taking estrogen for five years have a five-fold increase in risk while women taking it for a year double the risk,” said Jody Steinauer, MD, a research fellow at the University of California in San Francisco. Dr. Steinauer presented the study results here at the 51st annual meeting of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. She said that 48% and 54% of the women who took daily estrogen plus progestin developed urge incontinence and stress incontinence, respectively. Only 36% of women taking placebo developed urge incontinence and 38% developed stress incontinence.The study also gauged the risk for increasing severity of incontinence as judged by numbers of episodes of leaking in a week. Here, too, hormone use was associated with a worsening situation; women in the active therapy arm were twice as likely to have an increase in numbers of leaking events compared with women in the placebo arm.The results are based on information collected from 1,208 women who had no symptoms of either stress or urge urinary incontinence at baseline. All of the women in the study had a history of CVD and the average age of the women was 66 years. Women were asked to fill out continence questionnaires at study entry, four months into the study, and again at one year, two years, and four years. The women were randomized in a 1:1 manner to either 0.625 mg of conjugated estrogens plus 2.5 mg of medroxyprogesterone acetate daily or to placebo.Dr. Steinauer said she is not sure why estrogen increases the risk for incontinence but she noted that estrogen does make tissue “more supple and it may be that making it more supple may also make it more relaxed, which decreases bladder control.” Or, since the women have CVD, she said “there may be some vascular component in these women that influences the effect of estrogen on incontinence risk.” At one time researchers thought that estrogen could “be used to treat incontinence. This is understandable since there is such a wide network of estrogen receptors in the bladder and throughout the urinary tract. But earlier treatment studies reported no advantage,” she said. Gerald Joseph, MD, medical director of women’s services at St. John’s Health System in Springfield, Missouri, told Medscape that he is not surprised by this finding. He noted that many surgeons direct women undergoing pelvic reconstructive surgery to use estrogen to promote healing but he said that he has never seen any clinical evidence of benefit.These latest data should be considered in the context of the entire estrogen picture, Isaac Schiff, MD, chief of Vincent Memorial Hospital, Obstetrics and Gynecology Service, and the Women’s Care Division of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, told Medscape. “The final sentence has not yet been written.” He noted, for example, that there “is some suggestion that estrogen may be useful for treating women with recurrent urinary tract infections.” Dr.Schiff, who, like Dr. Joseph, was not a HERS investigator, presented a perspective on the history of hormone replacement therapy for the Irving Cushner Memorial Lecture at the meeting.Dr. Schiff is not alone in his willingness to follow estrogen to the end of the story — Dr. Steinauer takes a similar approach. She told Medscape that despite the study results, she still prescribes estrogen for women who have “debilitating hot flashes. Hands down, estrogen is still the best treatment for those symptoms.”

Some HRT Regimens May Increase Risk of Postmenopausal Stroke – (01-08-01)

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Some HRT Regimens May Increase Risk of Postmenopausal Stroke

Okay, okay…so why would someone want to take HRT again?? I just cannot figure it out. Reasons for taking HRT are several. Lowering risk of heart disease is one of these reasons; and yet research may indeed be pointing to an INCREASED risk for CVD with HRT use. Prevention of osteoporosis is another reason; HRT does not fix osteoporosis, it just slows its progression. Osteoporosis starts decades earlier and does not suddenly start at menopause. Try less animal proteins, more fruits and veggies, soy products, high quality calcium supplements and exercise to reduce and maybe even reverse osteoporosis.

Ann Intern Med 2000;133:933-941,999-1001 Twenty years of prospective follow-up in the Nurses’ Health Study shows that daily estrogen doses of 0.625 mg or higher plus progestin may increase the risk of stroke by up to 45%. Dr. Grodstein’s group found that that the age-adjusted relative risk of a major coronary event was 0.54 for current users of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) compared with women who never used HRT. While they observed little overall difference in the relative risk of stroke among users and non-users of HRT, stroke risk varied by daily estrogen dose. Stroke risk was lower among women who received estrogen at 0.3 mg/d compared who those who took 0.625 or 1.25 mg/d. And among women taking 0.625 mg/d of estrogen combined with progestin, the authors observed a 45% higher risk of stroke compared with those who never took HRT. In an accompanying editorial, Drs. Deborah Grady and Stephen B. Hulley, of the University of California at San Francisco, sugg! est that “hormone therapy may have mixed effects, causing thrombotic events while improving the lipoprotein profile.” If that is the case, they speculate that prothrombotic activity may be more damaging to the small vessels of the cerebrovascular circulation than to the larger vessels of the coronary circulation.