The lack of estrogen gel means that thousands of menopausal women catch a cold turkey and their symptoms return overnight. Hopefully they will get their hormones and live again soon. And then they may want something more: testosterone. Because, as a new generation of menopausal women have discovered, they lack not just two hormones — progesterone and estrogen — but three. Testosterone is also a female hormone, and the one we produce in the largest amount. three times that of estrogen. However, no one tells you this in school biology lessons. According to the British Menopause Society, it helps with energy, mood, libido and cognitive function, as well as maintaining muscles and bones. At work, I felt like clapping before I started testosterone. Now I know that I will cruise smoothly during the day, like Tesla, writes Kate Muir, in the photo While estrogen and progesterone suddenly drop during menopause, testosterone decreases slowly. But testosterone supplementation at that time can also help with debilitating symptoms. I have been using testosterone cream for six years as part of my hormone therapy. The main difference it makes to me is the memory – before I started taking it, I sometimes panicked and struggled to find the words for things. Now I can give a speech for an hour without notes. At work, I felt like clapping before I started testosterone. Now I know that I will travel the day smoothly, like Tesla. It’s not just my experience – as part of a documentary I produced, Davina McCall: Sex, Mind And The Menopause, which aired last night, we watched a group of 50 employees start taking testosterone in addition to their normal HRT over three months. The results were amazing. “I seem to have a clarity behind, a real focus and clarity on what I’m trying to say,” said Joanne Harding, a city councilor. He was exhausted before the experiment. “It’s tiring to feel so tired all the time,” he told us. (It was not just how they felt – blood tests showed that all women’s testosterone levels were low to zero in the beginning.) Paula Fry, a senior manager at City, said of her libido: “Brad Pitt would not do it for me.” After the testosterone treatment, her mojo returned and generally said “she feels like a mood lift, the missing piece of the puzzle”. Prior to our experiment, business manager Maggie Dennis simply said, “What is libido?” I had almost forgotten. “ And after? “I feel more like myself. I can think more clearly. I got my ba-ba-boom back! “ However, as Dr. Zoe Hodson, a Manchester doctor and menopause specialist, told the program: “We lose three hormones and they give us back two. “Whose bright idea was this?” He also explained that women’s fears that testosterone supplements would make them hairy were largely unfounded. Menopause experts give women only a small amount of testosterone, and about the same amount as the average woman in her early 40s (women need one-tenth of what men do). The lack of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has caused a stir, sparking debates in Parliament and sparking the appointment of an HRT tsar Occasionally women do not tolerate it well, and a report has suggested that some may experience mild acne and hair growth – especially if they use it excessively. But after six years, I have not grown a mustache. Dr. Hodgson said: “As long as it remains within the normal range of women, we can reduce the beard, we can reduce the testicles!” What was amazing was that testosterone in both women and men is commonly regarded as a sex hormone, enhancing desire. But experiments with women on our documentary – and what they themselves pointed out – showed that the hormone had restored their mental agility as well as their ability to feel pleasure. Carolyn Harris, a Labor MP who led the campaign in Parliament for an annual payment for HRT prescriptions, is another who has experienced the impact of testosterone on the brain. She started taking testosterone in addition to her HRT routine last year and is excited about the results: “Testosterone should be immediately available with a prescription for all women,” she told me. Many women in the foreground take testosterone and are happy to talk about it, such as Lorraine Kelly and Davina McCall, who has seen great results but admitted on last night’s show: “Testosterone was another hormone I lied about taking – I felt like and shame on her. ‘ Not anymore. The message comes out there, but slowly: in a survey of more than 4,000 women about the program, 61 percent had never heard that testosterone could be part of HRT. However, the NHS guidelines approve it “for menopausal women with low sexual desire, if HRT alone is not effective”. Setting up our testosterone tests for the program, we decided to go beyond the simple spin. We wanted women to have solid evidence of any changes, so they filled out an assessment form for the severity of more than 20 menopausal symptoms and a testosterone-specific test asking for brain fog, energy and libido. Most found that after testosterone treatment the general symptoms of menopause, such as difficulty sleeping, had become extreme to rare or non-existent. And they no longer placed the wrong items around the house – the syndrome with the car keys in the fridge was gone. We did not have time to show all this on TV, but our interviewees agreed to do other “before” and “after” tests, including memory tests. Again, there have been improvements. “I can remember my husband’s cell phone number now,” said one tester. Obviously, this was not a good science, and once you do a test you just tend to get better at it. But it did give women an idea of their progress. Menopause researchers hope to do cognitive testing on a larger scale, and academics at the Metropolitan University of Manchester plan to study women and testosterone with data from the UK Biobank (a project involving 500,000 people). There was a trial comparing testosterone gel and a placebo in 92 women who had not already received HRT, conducted by Professor Susan Davis at Monash University in Australia. He showed “a consistent finding of improved performance on testosterone learning and memory tests.” Studies have shown that testosterone treatment does not increase the risk of breast cancer – the long-term risks remain unchecked, but using a gel or cream is known to be safer than pills or implants. Despite the NHS approval of testosterone, very few doctors feel confident about prescribing it. Because it was once mistaken for just a male hormone, it was not taught in medical school. A female testosterone patch was approved in the UK years ago, especially for younger women with low sexual desire after a hysterectomy or removal of the ovaries, but was discontinued due to “lack of demand”. So now women are given male-sized sachets or testosterone gel pumps in the NHS and have to process one-tenth of the dose themselves. I’m on a six-month waiting list just to apply for a testosterone gel at the NHS Menopause Clinic. I get the rest of my HRT on the NHS, but I have to go private to buy AndroFeme, a testosterone cream for women licensed in Australia and imported here. It costs me about £ 160 a year – but I would rather have this than a cappuccino in the morning. The British Society for Menopause guidelines for doctors note that testosterone deficiency in women “can lead to a number of unpleasant sexual symptoms such as low sexual desire, arousal and orgasm.” “Testosterone deficiency can also help reduce overall quality of life, fatigue, depression, headaches, cognitive problems, osteoporosis and muscle loss.” Completing it seems pointless. As Davina McCall asks: “When will they give us back our own hormone?” Kate Muir is the author of Everything You Need to Know About Menopause (but you were too scared to ask).
Do it yourself Doctors
Scientists who have made medical progress by putting their bodies in line. This week: Werner Forssmann and heart surgery. Cardiac catheterization – a widely used procedure where a small tube is inserted into a blood vessel leading to the heart to diagnose or treat heart disease – was first used in 1929 when German scientist Werner Forssmann tried the procedure himself. Under local anesthesia, he inserted a catheter through a vein in his forearm into his heart and took an X-ray to confirm the position. This was a very dangerous process, but after seeing that it had been successfully performed on animals, Forssmann was convinced that humans could also undergo it. Forssmann would win the Nobel Prize in 1956 to pave the way for many types of heart treatments and tests.
