Can Hormone Therapy Stop My Menopausal Symptoms?

Each year in the United States, more than one million women begin their journeys through menopause. For some, this hormonal transition comes with only some minor bumps in the road, like a few months of hot flashes. However, others are plagued by a wide variety of side effects, from hot flashes to vaginal dryness to a host of other unpleasant symptoms.

Most women fall somewhere in the middle and experience a combination of symptoms that can make life uncomfortable. Wherever you fall on the menopause scale, if you want to turn back the clock on some of the quality-of-life issues, hormone replacement therapy can usually help.

At Louisiana Heart and Vascular, Dr. Farhad Aduli and our team offer a wide range of health care services, including hormone therapy.

Here’s a look at how this approach to menopause can help you move through this transition more easily.

The side effects of menopause

Menopause marks a transition from a woman’s reproductive years to her nonreproductive years, and it occurs when her ovaries begin to shut down. Not only does this mean that you no longer release eggs, but it also leads to a sudden drop in your reproductive hormones, namely estrogen hormones and progesterone.

The loss of these hormones can lead to many different symptoms, including:

• Hot flashes and night sweats
• Vaginal dryness
• Incontinence
• Bone loss
• Moodiness
• Weight gain

To give you an idea about how common some of these symptoms are, about 75% of women experience hot flashes and more than half of women experience vaginal dryness.

How hormone replacement therapy can help

Given that a hormone deficit is responsible for menopause symptoms, it makes sense that replacing the lost hormones can help reduce symptoms. And, there’s plenty of research to back this up. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has concluded that hormone therapy is the best way to resolve hot flashes, and it also works very well to protect against vaginal dryness and bone loss.

When you come see us, we evaluate the levels of hormones in your blood, review your symptoms, and come up with the best hormone therapy for your needs.

Hormone replacement therapy comes in different forms:

• Slow release pellets
• Pills
• Patches
• Topical creams
• Suppositories

So, for example, if you’re only struggling with vaginal dryness, we may recommend a vaginal cream or suppository to offset the symptom locally. However, if you have additional symptoms, such as hot flashes, moodiness, or bone loss, we may recommend a more systemic approach with pellets, pills, or patches.

To figure out whether hormone replacement therapy is right for you and which approach would work best, we invite you to book an appointment online or over the phone with Louisiana Heart and Vascular today. We’re located in Covington and Franklinton, Louisiana, and we also serve patients from Mandeville, Hammond, and Slidell.