Are Heart Attacks & Strokes Predictable? Part 3 of 4

Estrogen, Ovaries, and Plaque Risk 0:00

And hot off the presses, doesn't regard testosterone. It regards estrogen in women. 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. And they did a 10-year study of women who had had a hysterectomy and had their ovaries removed at a time of hysterectomy, compared to women that didn't have their overies removed. And they used a very sensitive test that we're going to talk about. That's the test we use to see how your arteries are.

And it's called a carotid intima media thickness. It's a measure of that endothelium and a look at whether there's plaque. The women who had their ovaries removed had a lot more plaque than the women that kept their ovaries. And this is just the latest in a whole series of studies that show that estrogen is protective for women. Estrogen is not a bad thing, estrogen's a very good thing. And it keeps your endothelium nice and healthy. 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 or a stroke.

We also know that testosterone is good for men and good women in terms of your arteries. And here's a study from the European Heart Journal and it was a studies of men. 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. 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 1:44

cardiovascular mortality as men who had higher testosterone levels. And their cancer mortality was almost three and half time greater. So testosterone needs to be really at an optimal level to protect your blood vessels and the rest of your body. And it turns out the same is true for women, too. So hopefully, I don't know if the men in the room have had their testosterone levels checked. You would like to get them checked and be sure that they're higher than 250. Yeah? You know, we don't have it quite that level for women as far as testosterone goes, so I can't answer that.

Many studies have shown that men with low testosterone have a higher incidence of heart attacks. Studies have showed in terms of estrogen, women have relatively few heart attack before menopause. And then within the first couple of years after menopause, they rapidly catch up with men. They've lost the protective effect of the estrogen. 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. And like I mentioned, removing ovaries before menopause increases heart attack risks in women.

And then this was a study that came out about a year ago. that was looking back at the Women's Health Initiative. 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. It said that Premarin, which was the estrogen that we used, was bad for women, there was increased risk of breast cancer. So the study was abruptly stopped. And what they didn't mention is that the progesterone, it was the synthetic pro-gest-er-one they used. They blamed it on estrogen. It really was a projesterone part of things. 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, or many women, abruptly went off of it.

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 and pondering. 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 to the public. So it created a sense of panic. 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.

I didn't have access to it. Couldn't answer people's questions. So, it whipped up this tremendous frenzy of fear, and lots of women went off their estrogen. Lots of doctors recommended to their patients that they come off of their estrogens. 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 the number of women who had hysterectomies but didn't get estrogen following their hysterectomie because everyone was so scared of it.

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. 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 of them died prematurely from cardiovascular disease due to lack of estrogen. So the excess, you know, they died pre-maturely mostly because of heart attacks.

Thyroid, Cholesterol, and Hormone Balance 5:56

So estrogen deprivation for women and testosterone deprivation for men is a serious cause of cardiovascular disease. It's important to have your hormones optimized. 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. And we know that thyroid function goes down, down down as you get older. It's actually one of the reasons why your cholesterol levels go up, up up. Because your thyroid, your circulating thyroid hormone helps to carry LDL cholesterol, one the cholesterol fractions, out of your body.

Helps you to get rid of it. 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. And they go, oh, your cholesterol's going up, so you need to be on a statin medication. 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. So we know that there is increased plaque and premature heart disease in people with low-functioning thyroid.

And that endothelium, that nice, smooth, beautiful lining, is not as healthy if your thyroid levels are low. So this is an example of three hormones, estrogen, testosterone, and thyroid that play an important role in terms of cardiovascular disease. In anti-aging restorative medicine, when we're looking at What's underlying these processes, certainly hormones is an important underlying process for the development of cardiovascular disease.