Dr. Betty Murray argues transdermal estrogen is safer than the conjugated equine estrogen used in the Women's Health Initiative. She highlights three concerns for older women: osteoporosis, Alzheimer's risk (which disproportionately affects women), and unclear cardiovascular effects of hormone therapy.
that transdermal estrogen is absolutely advantageous. And it is nowhere close to the actual conjugated equine estrogen that was used in the Women's Health Initiative that has caused all of this fervor over the last 22 years. All right. So let's talk about some of the mechanistic things that we need to understand. So let's go back to the 70-year-old woman, right? We now understand that this 70-year-old woman has some concerns, right? In many cases, osteoporosis and osteopenia is a concern. Definitely, if we look at dementia risk, particularly Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's is particularly predominantly female, and estrogen has the strongest correlation to the risks around Alzheimer's. Not so much for some of the other neurodegenerative diseases like ALS and MS and Parkinson's, but particularly Alzheimer's. And if you look at Alzheimer's patients, 3 out of 4 patients are female. Yes, we do outlive men, but we absolutely have the onset earlier and longer than men. All right. And so, and then if we look at some of the other data around cardiovascular disease, and I would say largely that's the area that we have the biggest gaps, we just don't know. But I'm going to start with some of the big ones because the other thing is you could do nothing, right? If you're listening to this and you happen to be in this age group and you're like, I, I could do nothing, right? You could do nothing, and that means you're going to probably get similar outcomes to what you do have right now. You could do something like hormone replacement therapy.
