Can a nursing mother of a 10 month old use natural progesterone cream for mood swings and low sex drive?

Hi Catherine,

Can a nursing mother of a 10 month old use natural progesterone cream for mood swings and low sex drive?

Thank you,

Katie

Dear Katie,

Your question mirors those fielded to our Network on a fairly regular basis, along with concerns about using progesterone cream before and during pregnancy. So let’s break your question down into some key elements.

Firstly, can a lactating mother use progesterone? Will this hormone interfere with her milk production? And will it have any adverse effects on her infant?

Our observation has been that progesterone supplementation has provided women suffering pronounced mood swings, perhaps bordering on depression, with a ‘happy’ and safe solution for mum and her baby, and has not interfered with her milk production.

Some women have even commented that they’ve been able to relax, cope better and enjoy the experience of motherhood for the first time, where their previous accounts battling depression and their refusal to resort to medication, or the side effects of the medication they were encouraged to take may have left them feeling quite cheated of the whole mothering experience.

Progesterone proponents like myself understand only too well how progesterone clears foggy thinking, helps us sleep better, clears the confusion in our head, helps us collect our thoughts, and think more clearly and rationally. It likewise relieves agitation and the tendancy to over-react. It basically calms our brain down.

Most women will be familiar with the term ‘baby blues’. With the sudden withdrawal of progesterone, depression can be triggered, known as post-natal depression. This can vary for every women in the time of onset, severity, and duration. And for other women, it can be insidious, often going undiagnosed and untreated for many years after the baby is born.

One of the factors of post natal depression is the sudden drop of progesterone once the baby is born. Ovarian output of progesterone in the non-pregnant state is 25-30mg daily during the luteal phase.

Consider for a minute that a women in the last trimester of her pregnancy is producing via the baby’s placenta between 340-400mg progesterone per day (as compared with ovarian output of 25-30mg progesterone daily in the non-pregnant state during the luteal phase). And that once the placenta is expelled her progesterone factory is shut down. This abrupt drop in progesterone at birth signals the body to raise prolactin levels (the milk-making hormone) which stimulates milk production in the breasts.

High levels of prolactin suppress progesterone production, and low progesterone levels can in turn stimulate prolactin synthesis.

Small doses of 15~20mg/day for approximately 4 months uninterrupted have proven quite adequate. You can start at lower dose and assess to see if your moods are lifting, and only increase if you feel you are not responding at that dosage. Give yourself a week to feel the benefits.

Dr Katharina Dalton is well known for her work and research in the treatment of post-natal depression (and PMS) using very high levels of progesterone ranging from 100~300mg daily, so introducing progesterone at levels of 15~20mg/day shouldn’t pose any risk to you or your baby.

But there’s more ….

Dr. Katharina Dalton summarized her 1968 research of 90 children whose mothers received ante-natal progesterone compared with matched controls that more children of mothers who had received ante-natal progesterone were still being breast-fed at six months; more were standing and walking at one year; and at nine to 10 years of age, more had demonstrated superior performance, compared to the control group, in academic subjects such as verbal reasoning, English, arithmetic and craft work. Both groups were equally developed in physical education.

Furthermore, a study reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry observed that administering natural progesterone from the middle trimester of pregnancy for relief of the symptoms of toxemia had some unexpected benefits: “A significant improvement in educational performance was demonstrated among children [whose mothers] received progesterone before the sixteenth week following conception; and after giving birth their mothers seemed to have greater success at breastfeeding”.

Dr. Dalton is one of the many scientists and doctors who have discovered that natural progesterone in the natural form:

• protects the fetus from miscarriage
• increases the feeling of well-being of the mother
• increases the potential IQ of the child
• produces calmer, less colicky babies

But what about your flagging libido? Well, the good news here is that progesterone is usually the best hormone to start with to improve your sex drive. Indeed, one of the first things women notice when they start using progesterone cream is that their libido returns almost immediately.

The hormones that improve libido are progesterone and testosterone. From an evolutionary point of view this makes sense since progesterone is the dominant hormone at ovulation when a woman is most fertile.

Sometimes doctors recommend testosterone but even slightly high levels can have masculinising effects and can make libido more intense than most women want. If you want to undergo testosterone supplementation during lactation please do so in collaboration with your treating physician.

To answer your questions, Katie, progesterone is often referred to as the “happy hormone” because it appears to be the treatment of choice to modulate and enhance our moods, and into the bargain restore our sexual appetite!

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