Do Bioidentical Hormones Increase Longevity and Healthspan?

Women on hormone therapy, bioidentical or not, live longer lives than women not put on anything in menopause. As we get closer and closer to taking a hormone replacement that mirrored what a woman's own organs were making when she was 30, her lifespan extends and her health span even extends more now. Why does the health span extend more than the lifespan? The reason for death in menopause is typically chronic illness such as cardiovascular disease, breast cancer and dementia. And if you live longer before you develop those things, it's still going to potentially happen at a later point in your life. So you'll, you'll enjoy more years of being healthy on bioidentical hormone replacement or on synthetic hormone replacement. You still will live a longer, healthier life than taking nothing, just not as much. You get about 6x improvement using the bioidentical, all three hormones. And we were using bioidentical hormone or something close to bioidentical hormones in the 80s, in 90s, we started using more synthetic hormones. In the early 2000s, a paper came out called the WHI was really misinterpreted by doctors who left to an abandonment of hormone replacement and menopause. And prescriptions went from almost one out of three women getting a hormone replacement therapy that did extend their lifespan to about 7%. This has drifted down since that time. Now it's about 2%. And there's a whole generation of doctors that have no idea how to prescribe hormones. It is very easy, but they don't have any idea how to prescribe hormones. They use instead of antidepressants, anti anxieties, obesity medications, diabetes medications instead of treating the underlying cause. I think that really goes back to a question we've discussed before. What's healthcare versus wellness? Wellness is preventing disease. Healthcare is taking care of disease. And doctors are trained to manage disease when it comes. We're not trained so well on disease prevention. And this is where you can be the chief executive of your own body and make these decisions, find the right provider, have that discussion with your, with your doctor. So that's the difference between bioidentical and synthetic hormones and longevity. In each case, they do extend lifespan and health span bioidentical as more potential years of lifespan added, more potential years of health span added. Really I'm talking this discussion. A lot of people don't want to think about living longer because we envision being sicker longer. We're really talking about expanding the number of years where you are not sick. That's what is defined health span. In addition to having a better mood, better maintenance of your weight. And I think that's critical. We have so many people going these GLP1 drugs, and they're great. I do prescribe those out of those women treating the underlying cause, which is typically menopause, which leads to weight gain. And if we look at weight gain and menopause, it's across the board. It happens to a lot of people, virtually everybody. And when we look at replacing, taking nothing versus taking oral estrogen, you have less weight gain. Topical or intradermal pellet estrogen, you have less weight gain than oral, and adding in testosterone, even better body composition. So hormone replacement therapy is something you should think about if you're worried about gaining weight or you are gaining weight. In addition to benefits of sexuality, of mood, of your body, own health, your skin health, your skin looks better hormone replacement than without it. So there's a bunch of reasons to consider bioidentical hormones. And I think you should have this discussion with your doctor. If your plan is to live a longer, healthy life, have a longer health span, have less major disease or morbidity, have less incidence of it, and to look and feel better.