Hormones play an important role in your body, assisting in everything from regulating blood pressure and metabolism to sleep patterns and mood. For women entering menopause, hormones play an especially crucial role in maintaining bone density and heart health.
Menopause causes a decrease in a woman’s normal estrogen and progesterone levels, so supplementing with hormone replacement therapy is an excellent way to help alleviate many of the common symptoms and effects associated with menopause. Let’s talk about how hormone replacement therapy works in bringing back your estrogen and/or progesterone levels, and where you can go in the Greater Atlanta area for outstanding therapy that counteracts the effects of menopause.
What Is Hormone Replacement Therapy?
During menopause, your estrogen and progesterone levels fall, resulting in uncomfortable symptoms like hot flashes, cold flashes, night sweats, mood swings, and vaginal dryness. Hormone replacement therapy can assist in balancing out and restoring your hormone levels, helping to relieve the most common symptoms of menopause.
Your health, symptoms, and personal preferences all play a role in helping you decide which hormone replacement therapy is best for you. The type of hormone replacement therapy your doctor may prescribe will depend on your individual needs.
How Does Estrogen Replacement Therapy Work?
Estrogen is the hormone that influences how your body uses calcium and maintains healthy blood cholesterol levels. Supplementing low estrogen levels caused by menopause can be an important step in preventing osteoporosis, heart disease, or stroke.
For women experiencing symptoms of menopause after a hysterectomy (surgery that removes the uterus), estrogen replacement therapy is the most-often prescribed method of hormone replacement therapy. It can be prescribed as a pill, patch, topical or vaginal cream, vaginal ring, gel, or spray.
Your doctor may prescribe a low-dose estrogen replacement therapy regimen to help relieve menopause symptoms, as well as to prevent osteoporosis and cardiovascular complications.
Are Estrogen and Progesterone Right for Me?
Estrogen and progesterone therapy, or combination therapy, is primarily prescribed for menopausal women who have not had a hysterectomy. Because the extra estrogen can heighten the growth of the endometrium, which is the lining of the uterus, estrogen therapy is best balanced out with progesterone in women who have never had their uterus removed.
Menstruation stops when menopause begins, and your uterus no longer sheds cells from the endometrium. The increased levels of estrogen can cause an overgrowth of these cells, putting you at an increased risk of endometrial cancer – which is also why progesterone is so important in hormone replacement therapy.
Progesterone also plays a key role in helping regulate blood pressure and improving mood levels and sleep cycles – some of the most common symptoms of menopause. If you have never had a hysterectomy, your doctor may prescribe estrogen and progesterone in the form of either a patch or pill to relieve the symptoms of menopause.
Adding a combination regimen of estrogen and progesterone therapy can therefore help reduce your risk of cancer while providing relief from the symptoms of menopause.
Menopause Treatment in Kennesaw, GA