While hot flashes, night sweats, and vaginal dryness may be some of the more obvious side effects of menopause, there are changes happening below the surface that can greatly impact your health and wellness.
Each year in the United States, more than one million women enter menopause and join the millions more who face an acceleration in bone loss. In fact, half of postmenopausal women have osteoporosis, which can lead to dangerous bone fractures.
At Lafferty Family Care, Dr. Scott Lafferty has had great success easing menopausal symptoms in women through bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. Not only does this approach provide relief from more annoying symptoms, like hot flashes and vaginal dryness, it also works below the surface and helps you maintain bone strength.
One might think that reproductive hormones only tasked themselves with, well, reproduction, but the reach of these hormones extends to other areas, including your bone health.
More specifically, estrogen plays no small role in your bone health as it regulates osteoblasts, the cells in charge of bone remodeling. Throughout your life, your bones are constantly rebuilding themselves, replacing old bone tissue with new to keep your skeletal structure strong and sound.
When you transition through menopause, your estrogen production drops off considerably and your osteoblasts stop producing as much bone. As a result, old bone tissues are being reabsorbed into your body, but they aren’t being replaced, leaving you with an increasing loss in bone density as your bones become more porous.
We’re not exactly sure how and why estrogen affects the osteoblasts, but it does, which is why women are far more prone to bone loss and osteoporosis. More than 27% of women aged 65 and older have osteoporosis compared to only about 6% of men in the same age group.
While we may not understand the exact nature of the connection between estrogen and your bone density, there’s no denying that the connection is there. Therefore, it makes sense that replacing these reproductive hormones is a great way to offset bone loss after menopause.
At our practice, we turn to bioidentical hormones, which are chemically the same as your natural hormones. Every four months, we place a pellet just below your skin, and it slowly releases replacement hormones into your system that help with the side effects of menopause, including bone loss.
To give you an idea about the success of this treatment, one report found that hormone replacement therapy, “reduces the risk of both spine and hip as well as other osteoporotic fractures even in women at low risk, as well as in those with established osteoporosis.”
If you want to maintain healthy and strong bones during and after menopause, please contact our office in Bentonville, Arkansas, for a consultation where we can discuss whether bioidentical hormone replacement therapy is right for you.
