August 30th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Longtime readers may recall that late last year, the New York Times published an essay about how hard Big Pharma has worked to market menopause as an estrogen deficiency disease. Despite that exposé and others of the well-documented risks and limited benefits of hormone therapy, plus thousands of lawsuits pending over the role of HT in breast cancer, there’s apparently still quite a large potential market for pharmaceutical treatments for menopause (and other women’s health concerns).
To find out exactly how to mine that market, you can purchase the research report titled Women’s Health Therapeutics Market to 2016 – High Unmet Need will Drive the Uptake of Novel Drugs in Menopause and Osteoporosis from GBI Research. The report promises the following:
- Analysis of the women’s health market in the leading geographies of the world, which include the US, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan.
- Market characterization of the women’s health market, including market size, annual cost of therapy, sales volume and treatment usage patterns.
- Key drivers and barriers that have a significant impact on the market.
This will better allow you to “align your product portfolio to the markets with high growth potential” and “develop market-entry and market expansion strategies by identifying the leading therapeutic segments and geographic markets poised for strong growth”. Not to mention the ability to “reinforce R&D pipelines by identifying new target mechanisms which can produce first-in-class molecules with more efficiency and better safety”.
It all looks very useful. Too bad I don’t have an extra $3500 in my back pocket.
Tags: advertising, big pharma, marketing, Menopause, women's health
Posted in Advertising, Menopause, New Research, Pharmaceutical | 2 Comments »
July 19th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
It’s been two weeks since Chris Hitchcock and I returned from San Diego’s recent Endocrine Society meetings. We are feeling incredibly happy with the success of our protracted, intense commitments to a controlled trial of oral micronized progesterone (marketed in the USA and Canada as Prometrium®) for night sweats and hot flushes/flashes. At the Endocrine Society we presented the first-ever trial showing that the molecularly identical progesterone by mouth is effective treatment for vasomotor symptoms (VMS = hot flushes/flashes and night sweats)(1). We were also invited to present our data at an Endocrine Society-sponsored press conference.
Why did a scientific study require so much from us? First, this trial started in 2003 as the initial scientific venture of the newly founded Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research–thus CeMCOR’s reputation became tied to this trial. Second, despite concerted efforts, we were never able to obtain peer reviewed funding for this study—we successfully supported it with individual private donations. Finally, because of the “estrogen myth” and its corollary negatives about progesterone, I wanted to gain additional accurate information about how Prometrium® works in women’s cardiovascular system from this same study. For that reason we decided to enroll only very healthy women who were within 1-10 years since their final flow—they had to be non-smokers, without obesity, diabetes, or high blood pressure, and further to have normal measured waist circumference, blood pressure, cholesterol, and fasting blood sugar levels. Therefore many women were interested but few were eligible. Continue reading...
Tags: CeMCOR, clinical trial, estrogen, guest post, hormones, hot flashes/flushes, Menopause, progesterone
Posted in Menopause, New Research, Pharmaceutical | 1 Comment »
July 14th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Photo of art by Czarnobyl by Flickr user urbanartcore.eu || CC 2.0
Since yesterday, although it seems longer, my RSS reader has been clogged with links to news reports about a UCSF study in which some women who lost weight found that their hot flashes diminished. Of course, that’s not what the headlines say. Here’s a sample of some of the titles of current stories about this study on Google news:
- Hot Flash Relief: Weight Loss Works, What Doesn’t? (US News & World Report)
- Bad hot flashes? Try dropping a few pounds (MSNBC.com)
- Losing weight may ease menopause symptoms (NBC13.com)
- Symptoms of Menopause Can Be Relieved by Weight Loss (Health News)
- Weight Loss Helped Overweight And Obese Women Reduce Hot Flushes (Medical News Today)
OK, that’s enough – see the trend? Suddenly weight loss is the cure for hot flashes. But in the actual study – which was about urinary incontinence, not menopause -141 women provided researchers with data about their hot flash symptoms six months after the study began. Sixty-five of the 141 women said they were less bothered by their hot flashes six months after participating in the weight loss program, 53 reported no change, and 23 women reported a worsening of symptoms.
Look at those numbers again, more slowly this time: 65 of 141 women who participated in a weight loss program were less bothered by hot flashes after six months. That’s 46% of the women – less than half – who found relief. Almost as many reported no change in symptoms, so why is this being touted as a successful intervention?
Because the women lost weight. Most of the news reports of this research stop just short of fat-shaming, but I submit that is exactly why this study is getting so much media attention. Even though it is well-established that diets do not work, even if you call them a “lifestyle change” or “a whole new way of eating”, and that the BMI (Body Mass Index) is useless as a gauge of health. In fact, fat is not a measure of health. But why pass up an opportunity to shame women about their bodies?
Tags: body image, fat acceptance, hot flashes/flushes, Menopause, shame
Posted in Media, Menopause, New Research, Newspapers | 4 Comments »
July 7th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Photo by Ed Yourdon | CC 2.0
I hope my colleague Heather Dillaway feels at least at little vindicated when she reads this: A new study in the Journal of Health Psychology reports that social and psychological factors have the biggest influence upon women´s sexual behavior during menopause, rather than biological changes such as declining hormone levels. While most published research on menopause–especially about sex and sexuality with respect to menopause–is conducted within a biomedical framework, Sharron Hinchliff, Merryn Gott, and Christine Ingleton talked to women about their experiences. (Radical!)
They found that almost all of the women in their study had experienced changes in their sex lives, but they attributed these changes to external factors, such as caring for ill or elderly relatives, low sexual desire from their partners, issues of relationship quality, as well as to perceived changes in levels of hormones. (I appreciate the researchers’ qualifier of perceived changes, as most women never have their hormone levels measured.)
The researchers concluded that women go through many lifestyle changes at mid-life, only some of which are biological. Psychological and social factors, as well as the increasing medicalization of menopause, affect their sexuality just as powerfully.
Somehow, this study isn’t getting anywhere near the publicity of the ‘new blood test for menopause’ study received last week.
Tags: menopausal transition, Menopause, middle-aged women, midlife, publicity
Posted in Menopause, New Research, Sex | 2 Comments »
June 28th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Collage by Merlinprincesse | Creative Commons 2.0
Guest Post by Heather Dillaway, Wayne State University
I keep seeing news articles about a “new Iranian study” that hopes to better predict “age at menopause” for women, and the authors of this study supposedly discovered a “blood test” that will be able to “predict menopause” within the next few years. It is touted as a way to judge when women will be “done” or be at the “end” of “menopause” and also to predict by default when they will be at the “end” of their “fertile” years (so that maybe they can know when they have to pop out that first or last baby). After seeing so many references to this study over the last week and having studied how women feel about the “beginning” and “end” of menopause for the last ten years myself, I can’t just sit back and not critique the underlying assumptions that are part of this study and air some of the concerns that I have about this impending blood test. Continue reading...
Tags: blood test, fertility, guest post, Menopause
Posted in Media, Menopause, New Research, Newspapers | 15 Comments »
June 23rd, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Wellcome Library, London // CC 2.0
The Endocrine Society has released a new, peer-reviewed statement on the risks and benefits of hormone therapy for menopausal women. The upshot is that risks and benefits vary depending on the age of the patient and the length of time since menopause:
One interesting finding . . . was that women who start hormone therapy within 10 years of menopause have a 30% to 40% reduction in total mortality.
In addition, in the 50 to 55 age group the task force concluded that hormone therapy reduced hot flashes and overactive bladder and that vaginal estrogen reduced recurrent urinary tract infections. The evidence also showed that hormone therapy reduced pain on intercourse and improved quality of life.
Given that there are thousands of lawsuits pending over the role of HT in breast cancer, I was especially interested in this nugget of new information:
“Our conclusion is that [the estrogen/progestin hormone combination] didn’t cause breast cancer — it caused preexisting tumors to grow to a size where they became detectable.”
Tags: Endocrine Society, estrogen, hormone therapy, hormones, Menopause, postmenopause
Posted in Menopause, New Research, Pharmaceutical | 3 Comments »
May 29th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Tags: evo-psych, hormones
Posted in Menarche, Menopause, Menstruation, New Research | Comments Off
May 13th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Guest Post by Jerilynn Prior, M.D., Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research
Yes! I’m sure you can hear my whoop of excitement and vindication. Finally, something negative about estrogen and positive about progesterone in the mainstream media. According to this article by Emily Anthes in the current issue of Scientific American: Mind, women’s risk for addiction, and potential for successful withdrawal, are both linked to our menstrual cycle hormones. Estrogen increases women’s addictive behaviors while progesterone assists with successful addiction recovery.
Why am I feeling vindicated? Because I recently declared that hot flushes/flashes and night sweats are estrogen addiction (1). That wild but supportable hypothesis is based on the evidence that prolonged or high-dose estrogen exposure is required for hot flushes to occur. But, it is the subsequent abrupt decrease in estrogen levels that triggers vasomotor symptoms. Drug exposure—drug withdrawal symptoms. And do women feel high on estrogen? Perhaps. Clearly the withdrawal is miserable—as one woman said, “I continued to take it only because I couldn’t stand being off the hormone. I really couldn’t function.” (p. 2130 (2). Just ask any woman taking estrogen for hot flushes who has tried to stop it. Continue reading...
Tags: addiction, anatomy, estrogen, guest post, hormones, physiology, progesterone
Posted in Menopause, New Research, anatomy, magazines | 4 Comments »
April 23rd, 2010 by Chris Hitchcock
Recently the New York Times published a long article entitled the Estrogen Dilemma. It’s an article rich with many issues, and previous blogs have critiqued its uncritical acceptance of the timing hypothesis, and its failure to distinguish between the transient symptoms of perimenopause, early menopause, and the rest of your long, healthy, post-menopausal life.
But it is quite remarkable to me that, when speculating about potential hormonal treatment for poor memory and issues of staying on task, the only steroid hormone that seemed to be on anyone’s radar was estrogen. The writer had a lot of space (7600 words) and gave the scientist a lot of freedom to speculate, so I’m guessing that the absence of progesterone in the article is a true representation of her conceptual blind-spot. Progesterone was mentioned a few times, in the context of protection from uterine cancer, and in the context of using MPA (a synthetic relative) as a possible scapegoat in interpreting the WHI randomized hormone therapy trial data. But never did I see any suggestion that progesterone might be anything other than a necessary evil.
In fact, there are some intriguing new research areas that look at progesterone as therapy in neurological domains. Continue reading...
Tags: big pharma, estrogen, hormones, neurology, progesterone
Posted in Menopause, Menstruation, New Research, Newspapers | Comments Off
April 19th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Guest Post by Jerilynn C. Prior, Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research
I just read “The Estrogen Dilemma” in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, and I feel like weeping—in sorrow and deep sadness. This article by Cynthia Gorney is about energetic, intelligent women who feel they must take estrogen in order to survive perimenopause yet have deep worries about its risks. I know personally the anguishing changes that erupt during perimenopause. “The Estrogen Dilemma” also evoked my frustration and even rage. It is wrong that symptomatic women in the midst of the long and stormy midlife transition have to face a conundrum—to take estrogen or not. It arises from a Nixonian-style cover-up of three proven and important-for-women truths: 1) Perimenopause causes higher and not lower estrogen levels. (By perimenopause I mean the transition from fertile menstrual cycles to menopause, or the life phase beginning one year beyond the final menstrual flow.) 2) Progesterone, estrogen’s essential partner hormone, in contrast to estrogen, truly is lower in perimenopause. 3) Women survive perimenopause and “graduate” into a less symptomatic menopause. Continue reading...
Tags: big pharma, estrogen, guest post, hormones, Menopause, perimenopause, progesterone
Posted in Menopause, New Research, Newspapers, Pharmaceutical | 2 Comments »
April 18th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Guest Post by Paula S. Derry, Ph.D.
Déjà vu
An article in today’s New York Times Magazine recounts the author’s experience with a debilitating depression that began during her perimenopause, the transitional time leading up to menopause. For her, prescription estrogen was a life-saver that alleviated her symptoms. The article places her experience in the context of research on the Timing Hypothesis, an idea that arose after the Women’s Health Initiative, or WHI, research project. WHI clinical trials documented that hormone supplements after menopause did not, as had previously been assumed, lower a woman’s risk of heart disease. Heart disease risk was not lower, and, in fact, when a number of chronic illnesses were considered together, the medication did more harm than good overall. The Timing Hypothesis is the idea that the WHI was fundamentally flawed, because hormones must be started right around the time of menopause to have a health-promoting effect and the subjects in WHI were on average over 60; if started when a woman is older, when chronic illnesses have already started, the hormones are actually harmful rather than helpful. The Sunday New York Times article presents this idea uncritically, without quoting any of the many experts who do not find it plausible or convincing, and, in addition, presents a lurid, unscientific description of perimenopausal hormonal dynamics with words like “ricocheting hormones” and an “upheaval” that causes a “hellacious strain” on the brain. The author suggests that WHI was a poorly planned study that asked the wrong questions with the wrong methodology. The Timing Hypothesis, if true, might lead to a cure for Alzheimers and have other important health repercussions. Continue reading...
Tags: depression, estrogen, guest post, heart disease, hormone therapy, hormones, Menopause, perimenopause, timing hypothesis, WHI
Posted in Menopause, New Research, Newspapers, Pharmaceutical | 1 Comment »
March 7th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Guest Post by Jerilynn C. Prior, Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research
A hot flush causes failure on a lie detector test! The same galvanic skin response (in simple terms—clammy skin) is positive in both. Why? Because—with every flush—there is massive dogs’ breakfast of neurotransmitters and brain stress hormones released. These are the same brain chemicals that are produced as we struggle to create a plausible falsehood. Both arise from a fundamental, brain pathway that mediates both our physical and emotional responses to “threats” (be they nutritional, emotional, physical or some combination of stressors).
Some years ago a psychologist from London Ontario showed that menopausal women’s hot flushes were increased by stressful environment (1). Menopausal women who regularly experienced eight hot flushes a day attended two randomly-ordered 4-hour sessions a week apart. During the sessions they had flushes objectively documented by galvanic skin response. When they were forced to experience a chaotic environment, loud noises, unpleasant videos and bright lights, each of these women experienced more hot flushes; they did not in the alternative calm and pleasant session (1). Likewise, the large Study of Women Across the Nation showed that perimenopausal women who reported “trouble paying for basics” (like food and shelter) had more hot flushes than did those with economic and social security (2). Continue reading...
Tags: anatomy, bioidentical hormone therapy, guest post, hot flashes/flushes, Menopause, placebo effect
Posted in Health Care, Menopause, New Research | Comments Off
Readers should note that statements published in re: Cycling are those of individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Society as a whole.
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