Full Transcript Estrogen, Ovaries, and Plaque Risk 0:00 And hot off the presses, doesn't regard testosterone. 0:06 It regards estrogen in women. 0:07 A study just came out this week, and it was done at the Keck School of Medicine, which is up at The University of Southern California. 0:14 And they did a 10-year study of women who had had a hysterectomy and had their ovaries removed at a time of hysterectomy, 0:23 compared to women that didn't have their overies removed. 0:27 And they used a very sensitive test that we're going to talk about. 0:29 That's the test we use to see how your arteries are. 0:33 And it's called a carotid intima media thickness. 0:36 It's a measure of that endothelium and a look at whether there's plaque. 0:40 The women who had their ovaries removed had a lot more plaque than the women that kept their ovaries. 0:45 And this is just the latest in a whole series of studies that show that estrogen is protective for women. 0:52 Estrogen is not a bad thing, estrogen's a very good thing. 0:55 And it keeps your endothelium nice and healthy. 0:57 It keeps that velvety lining nice, and smooth, not as likely to have particles settle and cause rough spots that then end up leading to a heart attack 1:09 or a stroke. 1:12 We also know that testosterone is good for men and good women in terms of your arteries. 1:20 And here's a study from the European Heart Journal and it was a studies of men. 1:26 Really men's total testosterone levels should be between 700 and 1100. Men who had really low levels, less than 250, They had more than double the mortality. 1:40 All-cause mortality means heart disease mortality, cancer, strokes, Alzheimer's, all different types of mortality They have two and a half times as much
Testosterone Levels and Cardiovascular Protection 1:54 cardiovascular mortality as men who had higher testosterone levels. 1:57 And their cancer mortality was almost three and half time greater. 2:02 So testosterone needs to be really at an optimal level to protect your blood vessels and the rest of your body. 2:10 And it turns out the same is true for women, too. 2:14 So hopefully, I don't know if the men in the room have had their testosterone levels checked. 2:20 You would like to get them checked and be sure that they're higher than 250. Yeah? 2:31 You know, we don't have it quite that level for women as far as testosterone goes, so I can't answer that. 2:42 Many studies have shown that men with low testosterone have a higher incidence of heart attacks. 2:49 Studies have showed in terms of estrogen, women have relatively few heart attack before menopause. 2:55 And then within the first couple of years after menopause, they rapidly catch up with men. 3:00 They've lost the protective effect of the estrogen. 3:03 Estrogen is anti-inflammatory in the blood vessels and like I said, keeps that endothelium, that velvety lining nice and soft and pliable and velvy. 3:13 And like I mentioned, removing ovaries before menopause increases heart attack risks in women. 3:20 And then this was a study that came out about a year ago. 3:26 that was looking back at the Women's Health Initiative. 3:30 And the women's health initiative was a huge study of 80,000 women.
Menopause, WHI Fallout, and Estrogen Loss 3:34 The results first came out in 2002, and people have been reworking the data ever since. 3:40 It said that Premarin, which was the estrogen that we used, was bad for women, there was increased risk of breast cancer. 3:47 So the study was abruptly stopped. 3:51 And what they didn't mention is that the progesterone, it was the synthetic pro-gest-er-one they used. 3:58 They blamed it on estrogen. 3:59 It really was a projesterone part of things. 4:02 So at any rate, with this talk of this 80,000 people that were in the study and higher breast cancer, most women that are on estrogen, 4:10 or many women, abruptly went off of it. 4:13 Now, one thing about the Women's Health Initiative is The data were just released in a scientific journal for doctors to start looking at and reviewing 4:23 and pondering. 4:24 The people at the NIH that ran the study called a press conference on a Sunday evening before the journal came out to blast the sensational information 4:37 to the public. 4:38 So it created a sense of panic. 4:40 And I remember Monday morning with people calling my office and me not even having seen the article yet, because it wasn't out in print. 4:48 I didn't have access to it. 4:50 Couldn't answer people's questions. 4:52 So, it whipped up this tremendous frenzy of fear, and lots of women went off their estrogen. 4:58 Lots of doctors recommended to their patients that they come off of their estrogens. 5:03 And when people looked back at what happened during the 10-year period starting in 2002 when that bomb was dropped, and they looked from 2002 to 2012 at 5:14 the number of women who had hysterectomies but didn't get estrogen following their hysterectomie because everyone was so scared of it. 5:26 Usually when you get a hystrectomy and your ovaries out, traditionally women were given estrogen to cut down their hot flashes and help their long-term health. 5:36 It's estimated because those women that had hysterectomies in that first 10 years after the Women's Health Initiative, probably anywhere from 18 to 91,000 5:47 of them died prematurely from cardiovascular disease due to lack of estrogen. 5:53 So the excess, you know, they died pre-maturely mostly because of heart attacks.
Thyroid, Cholesterol, and Hormone Balance 6:00 So estrogen deprivation for women and testosterone deprivation for men is a serious cause of cardiovascular disease. 6:08 It's important to have your hormones optimized. 6:12 And there are a number of other hormones, and I'm not going to go into all of them, but certainly thyroid is an important one in terms of cardiovascular disease. 6:20 And we know that thyroid function goes down, down down as you get older. 6:24 It's actually one of the reasons why your cholesterol levels go up, up up. 6:29 Because your thyroid, your circulating thyroid hormone helps to carry LDL cholesterol, one the cholesterol fractions, out of your body. 6:38 Helps you to get rid of it. 6:40 And so what doctors do is they don't give people thyroid medication, even though they have every symptom in the world of thyroid deprivation and thyroid lack. 6:49 And they go, oh, your cholesterol's going up, so you need to be on a statin medication. 6:54 Instead of saying, why don' we look at your thyroid and get that corrected, because maybe some of your creeping cholesterol is due to low thyroid. 7:02 So we know that there is increased plaque and premature heart disease in people with low-functioning thyroid. 7:11 And that endothelium, that nice, smooth, beautiful lining, is not as healthy if your thyroid levels are low. 7:19 So this is an example of three hormones, estrogen, testosterone, and thyroid that play an important role in terms of cardiovascular disease. 7:27 In anti-aging restorative medicine, when we're looking at What's underlying these processes, certainly hormones is an important underlying process for 7:37 the development of cardiovascular disease.
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