Only 7% of women get hormone replacement therapy, even though estrogen receptors throughout bone, muscle, and cartilage make these tissues sensitive to hormonal shifts. After menopause, plummeting estrogen accelerates muscle loss, bone density decline, and cartilage breakdown. These changes are largely preventable with early awareness and action.
Only 7% of all women in the country are being prescribed hormone replacement therapies. All musculoskeletal tissues come from the same type of stem cell and then just differentiate, whether it's bone, muscle, cartilage, fat. They all have common origins and they all have estrogen receptors. So every month when our hormones fluctuate, our musculoskeletal system is affected. That's one of the reasons why young women have most of the ACL ruptures. It's why we see performance changes at different times in the month according to a woman's cycle. But when we get to the time of our lives that I'm in where estrogen walked out the door— I mean, you're— I'm so far postmenopausal I can't even remember. But our estrogen receptors on our musculoskeletal system are left bare. And I say this realizing that people have a really hard time with the perimenopause symptoms of hot flashes, night sweats, brain fog. But in general, those things will diminish with time. But for the musculoskeletal system, if we don't get in front of loss of muscle mass, loss of bone density, loss of our cartilage, chronic inflammation that causes disease— those are devastating and life-changing. But here's the deal: mostly preventable if we just knew.
