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 The subtle selling of estrogen
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How do women "lose estrogen"?  Found yesterday in the Sunday "magazine" section of my local newspaper, an article on David Letterman's recent heart bypass surgery  (US late night TV talk show host):

The article was titled "What you can learn from Dave's By-Pass"  with a highlighted list of "Take home advice from Dave's surgeon." 

     "Get tested; Men should do an exercise stress test at age 40; women at age 50. As women lose estrogen, their risk of  heart attack increases."

    What the heck does a statement like that mean? How do women "lose estrogen"? Does this mean this advice only refers to women who had their ovaries removed surgically and if so, why did they not say it?

   Does it refer to naturally post-menopausal women who have been wrongfully considered to have "lost" their estrogen, even though it continues to be produced life long when women retain their ovaries and little girls pre-puberty do not seem to be at any greater risk for heart attack?

   Does this somehow "sell" the importance of taking an estrogen drug to make up for this "loss" and thereby gain heart attack protection? Even though this simply has never been shown to be true and the two important recent studies have shown that it isn't. Indeed the HERS study found that taking HRT increased adverse cardiac events in the first year of taking these drugs as secondary "prevention"..

  Or is the statement simply a funny way of saying when women get older (a.k.a. when they lose estrogen), they are more at risk for heart attack? If so, why did they not say "women get older" rather than saying "when women lose estrogen"? They lose a lot of other things too, like progesterone and prolactin ...so why not use those as the buzzwords for "getting older?" Why did they glom onto just "estrogen"?

  Does this statement rely on those outdated statistics that were done in the 1950's which found that men had heart attacks at a much younger age than women did, overlooking the fact that at that time the number of  heavy male smokers far outweighed women smokers  and smoking was the leading reason for the earlier male death.

  This above factoid got hi-jacked by the estrogen drug companies, who without any further proof or exploration twisted it beyond recognition and started the urban myth that "estrogen must protect women from these earlier heart attacks." Never proven, never shown, except perhaps in the surgical menopause woman.

  This is the pro-HRT "doctrine" long preached to women that has been turned on its head now that it has finally been studied in controlled trials which show there was never any proof to support it in the first place - something which has long been pointed out by those who had bothered to read any of the alleged "supporting studies".

  And if it is the case that this advice is only for the surgical meno woman, why did they not say that? Was it because they still think that most women are surgical meno women, as was the case a generation ago, so they can continue to interchange "menopause" with castration and sell drugs to all women based only on what they learned about the "castration generation" when 65% of US women had been castrated (up until  about 1985)

  Just a few small words, but what sort of legacy do words like that leave when they sell ever so softly to the nation's continued appetite for carcinogenic estrogen drugs?

J

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