Why would I need progesterone if I no longer have a uterus?
If you’re relatively young and you’re still getting a period each month, the surgical removal of your ovaries during a hysterectomy will mean your body CAN NO LONGER manufacture adequate, if any, progesterone.
Consider this. Medical professionals are now being taught that bioidentical progesterone can be used in hormone replacement therapy to prevent endometrial hyperplasia, to treat infertility, or to support progesterone-deficient pregnancies. But there’s more! A growing number of reports show that bioidentical progesterone exerts many additional effects throughout the body.
Progesterone is critical to ensuring bone health. It offers neuroprotection, contributes to cardiovascular health, assists normal brain development, and provides protection from some types of cancer.
In fact, the use of bioidentical progesterone may soon be indicated for the treatment of a large population that includes men, women, and (possibly) infants. Synthetic progestins cannot be substituted for many of the favorable actions of bioidentical progesterone.
Therefore, supplementing physiological doses (20 mg) of bio-identical progesterone has been known to fix many of the problems associated with hormone imbalance post surgically induced menopause. Sometimes this dose needs to be increased.
Sometimes women may need to supplement bio-identical estriol and/or testosterone for vaginal dryness, hot flashes and/or loss of libido, but progesterone supplementation is the best place to start, particularly given that your body can convert in the body the progesterone you are applying in your cream into estrogen and/or testosterone.
Progesterone may be required to oppose estrogen dominance brought about through exposure to xenoestrogens.
A word to those women who are overweight (probably through no fault of their own!). Progesterone replacement therapy will provide protection against your increased risk of breast cancer as a result of your fat cells releasing too much estrogen into your blood.
It is a fact, albeit a harsh one, an overweight woman can potentially be producing HIGHER levels of estrogen in her body (estrogen dominance) after menopause than she did during her reproductive years.
For example, a woman who is obese, with a body mass index of 30 or more, has a 18 percent higher chance of developing breast cancer than a woman with a BMI of 25 - just on the border of being overweight.
This is why undergoing estrogen supplementation just because you’ve had a hysterectomy might be the wrong approach.
Instead, prescribing bio-identical progesterone to ‘oppose’ the profilerative action of estrogen in her body and induce cell maturation and death - seems to make a lot more sense.
According to the World Health Organization, 1.2 million women globally will develop breast cancer.
With the advent of bioidentical, natural-to-the-body HRT, safer choices are now available for you and your doctor.
