Blog of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research

The pill, reduced period pain and the ongoing delusion

January 20th, 2012 by Laura Wershler

Is there a woman over the age of 18 anywhere who doesn’t know that taking the birth control pill can make her periods lighter and less painful? Most women know this, but not many know why. The news stories swirling around a new study about the pill and period pain will not enlighten them.

Photo credit: Ceridwen, Creative Commons 2.0

A 30-year longitudinal Swedish study has finally proved the worth of what is accepted practice in North America and Europe: the prescribing of combined oral contraceptives (COCs), or birth control pills with synthetic estrogen and progestin, to treat painful periods known clinically as dysmenorrhea.

Of course, pharmaceutical companies that manufacture COCs are probably eager for this research, as prescribing the pill for dysmenorrhea is still an off-label use in the U.S. (unlicensed use in the U.K.). Pill manufacturers may be able to use this finding to lobby the FDA (or equivalent agencies in other nations) to approve the pill as treatment for menstrual pain, leading to increased sales and insurance coverage. Perhaps that’s why news media have been treating this discovery as breaking news.

Take this headline: Yes, the Pill CAN ease the agony of period pain: Scientists confirm what millions of women already know, or this one: The pill ‘does ease period pain’, or this one: Combination oral contraception pills cut menstruation pain, or, really, any of these.

You can read the abstract of the study by Swedish researchers Ingela Lindh, Agneta Andersson Ellström and Ian Milsom, published this week in the journal Human Reproduction, here: The effect of combined oral contraceptives and age on dysmenorrhoea: an epidemiological study. The conclusions are simple: “COC use and increasing age, independent of each other, reduced the severity of dysmenorrhoea. COC use reduced the severity of dysmenorrhea more than increasing age and childbirth.”

Forget the age factor for the purposes of this discussion. The fact that COC use reduces the severity of dysmenorrhea is not astounding. This is old news. So says Dr. Steven Goldstein, an obstetrician/gynecologist at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City, quoted in a USA Today story:

“The study results are not surprising. It’s gratifying to see researchers documenting scientifically what practitioners have been seeing for a very long time. The amount of discomfort from a woman’s period with a combination birth control pill is a fraction of what it is without the Pill. There is a diminution of pain from the Pill.”

What is astounding is what Dr. Goldstein, and other OBGYNs, didn’t say in responding to the study. That the reason the pill reduces menstrual pain is because the synthetic hormones in the pill shut down a woman’s own menstrual cycle. The “period” women experience when on the pill is technically known as a “withdrawal bleed,” brought on by seven days of placebo pills. While it feels like a period to menstruators, it is not the same physiologically as the period they experience when NOT on the pill. That’s why it doesn’t hurt as much.

The point is, the pill is too often credited with regulating the menstrual cycle. It does no such thing. The pill does not regulate any woman’s menstrual cycle; it supercedes it. This research, and the many news stories that reported it, once again ascribe power to the pill – this time the power to cut menstrual pain. This is an incomplete truth.

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Posted in Birth Control, Communication, Dysmenorrhea, Health Care, Menstruation, New Research, Pharmaceutical | 6 Comments »

Yaz, Yasmin and Ortho Evra patch increase risk of blood clots

December 14th, 2011 by Laura Wershler

Blood clots are a serious, if rare, side-effect of hormonal contraceptives. If left untreated, clots can lead to debilitating, or fatal, strokes. The increased risk of blood clots in users of some hormonal birth control brands has been the subject of several recent news stories.

In early December, Health Canada asked Bayer Inc. to change the labels on Yaz and Yasmin, two of the most popular birth control pills, because use of the drugs is linked to higher rates of blood clots.

According to a November 2011 story at cbc.ca/news, health problems associated with these two drugs include stroke, deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism and heart attack.

The concern surrounds the progestin – drospirenone –  used in Yaz and Yasmin. Although promoted as being associated with less bloating and clearer skin than other progestins, drospirenone is also associated with a “1.5-to-three fold increased risk of experiencing a clot compared to women using other birth control drugs.”

What this means in real terms varies from study to study, but one study led by Susan Jick of Boston University found the rate of non-fatal blood clots to be 30.8 per 100,000 among women taking Yaz or Yasmin (the only drugs containing drospirenone) compared to 12.5 per 100,00 among those taking pills containing the older, more common progestin levonorgestrel.

In related news this past week, advisers to the FDA recommended that Johnson and Johnson revise the label on its Ortho Evra birth control patch to better explain the risk of blood clots. Use of the patch has been associated with a higher rate of blood clots for several years. Publicity about the clot risk has no doubt contributed to a 50% decline in sales in the last five years. The formulary problem with the patch is its higher dose of estrogen compared to other pills.

The FDA advisers also recommended more detailed description of blood clot risks for Yaz and Yasmin.

What caught my eye in both stories were the take home messages from those requiring these label changes to women using these drugs.

Health Canada said women should talk with their doctors about the risks and benefits of taking drospirenone-containing oral contraceptives but did not urge women to stop using Yaz and Yasmin.

The FDA’s reproductive health advisers “voted 19-5 that the benefits of the weekly Ortho Evra patch outweigh its risks, including a potentially higher risk of dangerous blood clots that can cause heart attack, stroke and other life-threatening problems.”

I want to know why the five FDA panelists opposed to this decision think the benefits of the patch DO NOT outweigh the risks.

These news stories beg the question:  Should women be concerned enough about the increased blood clot risk associated with Yaz, Yasmin and the Ortho Evra patch to stop using these brands?  If you take these drugs, are you concerned?

If adverse publicity about blood clots resulted in a sharp decline in sales of the Ortho Evra patch, we should expect to see a similar decline in sales of Yaz and Yasmin.

The cbc.ca article reports that the family of a Toronto woman, who died of a large pulmonary embolism after taking Yasmin, has filed the first individual civil suit against Bayer Inc. in Canada. It also states that “more than 10,400 individual lawsuits related to the two pills have been filed in the U.S.”  Not to mention the class action suits related to these drugs currently in progress in both countries.

One thing is certain, the litany of stories about the adverse effects of hormonal contraceptives is not about to end anytime soon. Stay tuned.

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Posted in Birth Control, Law/Legal, Menstruation, Pharmaceutical | 3 Comments »

Does the Pill cause prostate cancer?

November 16th, 2011 by Laura Wershler

Of the growing list of reasons why women might want to reconsider using birth control pills, this could well be the strangest.

Researchers at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto published a study on Nov. 15  in the BMJ Open Journal in which they found a “strong correlation” between the use of birth control pills and the incidence of prostate cancer worldwide.

One of the possible explanations of how the two are related is the potential impact of the estrogen compound – ethinyloestradiol – that women using the pill secrete in their urine. It has been speculated elsewhere that these endocrine-disrupting substances could end up in our drinking water or get into the food chain.

The Pill, introduced in the 60’s, has been widely used for decades. The study suggests that exposure to these substances over 20 to 30 years could have a clinically significant effect. Researchers said further study of this link is needed.

In 2010 the media was full of stories marking the 50th anniversary of the birth control pill. The Pill at 50: Sex, Freedom and Paradox, rang the headline of a Time Magazine article by Nancy Gibbs. Could rising rates of prostate cancer be part of this paradox?

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Posted in Birth Control, Health Care, Men, New Research | 3 Comments »

Hormone Therapy and the Brain

November 24th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling

Medical-Anatomical-Superior-half-of-diseased-brainSo there’s a surge today in news stories about how hormone treatment for menopause (popularly known as ‘hormone replacement therapy’ or HRT) benefits the brain, apparently based on publicity over this study published in Hormones and Behavior. In media interviews, the researchers suggest that HT enhances the communication between left and right sides of the brain, making the older women’s brains more similar to those of younger women. The researchers had the women perform tasks designed to demonstrate fine motor coordination, such as tapping buttons with different fingers. Of the 62 women in the study, the 36 on hormone treatments showed higher levels of motor coordination, leading the researchers to conclude that hormone treatments, especially estrogen, “exert positive effects on the motor system thereby counteracting an age-related reorganization.”

Admittedly, I have not read the entire study, just the abstract and press summaries, but would you consider me too cynical if I suggested that the publicity this research report is receiving is more about promoting the use the hormones among menopausal women than the significance of the research findings?

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Posted in Menopause, New Research | 3 Comments »

And the Bad News about Hormone Therapies Continues to Accumulate…

October 21st, 2010 by Heather Dillaway

Yes, the hormone therapies prescribed for women in perimenopause and beyond have already been suspect. Especially after the initial Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) trial results in 2002 (but even before that), researchers documented the health risks associated with the use of hormones during menopause, especially combination hormone therapies (therapies including estrogen plus progesterone, such as Prempro). SMCR’s Jerilynn Prior has done plenty of work on this as has SMCR’s Paula Derry, and WHI researchers and spokespeople have had to come out about many of the health risks as well. Now, this week, we find out that not only is there an increased risk of breast cancer for women who use these hormone therapies but that, according to a New York Times article published on Tuesday, “Women who took hormones and developed breast cancer were more likely to have cancerous lymph nodes, a sign of more advanced disease, and were more likely to die from the disease than were breast cancer patients who had never taken hormones.” According to this New York Times article, this report is the first to reveal WHI death rates.

After the dust settled from the original WHI reports about the risks of hormone therapies, researchers and doctors often made claims that it was still okay for women to be on hormone therapies for an extended period of time. Instances of death (instead of just disease/illness) are now causing some researchers and doctors to come forward and say that it is no longer safe for women to be on hormone therapies for this amount of time. Dr. Chleblowski, an author of the latest study about women’s mortality, is quoted in the New York Times article as saying that women should not stay on Prempro for more than a year or two.

Bottom line, these drugs are dangerous for women. The older we get, the more we realize that illness, disease, and death are a normal part of life. I find myself realizing this more and more each day as I watch people around me get sick, die, or have to deal with the loss of loved ones. But illness, disease, and death caused by prescriptions and indirectly by doctor’s care (what is often termed iatrogenic illness or death) is just not okay – especially when more caution could be used. Sure, it’s happened all throughout history. Plenty of people died so we could have Aspirin, Viagra, epidurals, Coumadin, birth control pills, safe abortions, hysterectomies, and pacemakers, just to name a few.  But, as a doctor quoted in the New York Times article says, “The fallback is that doctors and patients should be deciding this on a one-to-one basis, weighing risks and benefits,” [but] “How do you do that when you don’t know what the risks are?”

We know that doctors are left in a precarious position, as are female patients, as they contemplate the use of hormone therapies….but what these articles and reports aren’t saying outright is that it is probably better NOT to use these drugs unless we absolutely have to. I was listening to Detroit’s NPR station driving home from work yesterday and heard even Dr. Susan Hendrix, a Detroit-based WHI researcher and doctor say, “maybe we can now just laugh at hot flashes,” instead of rely on combination hormone therapies to help us. At least that’s what she was inferring. We don’t completely understand all of the risks of combination hormone therapies but we know they include possible cancer and death, and delayed diagnosis of cancer as well (which means further death).  Since yesterday was “Love Your Body Day,” I think perhaps we need to love our bodies more by remembering that some of the signs and symptoms we experience (such as hot flashes and irregular bleeding in menopause, no matter how hard to deal with) are not life-threatening, are completely normal, and can be dealt with without drugs — because the alternative is not so benign. Why should women continue to worry about whether they’ll die by Prempro? It seems WHI results are beginning to get even clearer, and I’ll be interested to see whether rates of prescription decrease after this last report. I also wonder what the makers of Hot Flash Havoc might think of this.  Continue reading...

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Ghostwritten articles funded by Wyeth overstated benefits and downplayed harms

September 8th, 2010 by Chris Hitchcock

An open-access article published in PLOS Medicine yesterday, Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, associate professor in the Department of Physiology at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington DC, presents an article describing the ways in which the pharmaceutical industry used a medical education & communication company to produce ghostwritten articles that inserted marketing messages into articles published in medical journals.

This article is the first academic analysis of the 1500 documents unsealed in recent litigation against the pharmaceutical giant Wyeth (now part of Pfizer). It reveals the ways in which pharmaceutical companies use ghostwriters to insert marketing messages into articles published in medical journals. Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, associate professor in the Department of Physiology at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington DC, analyzed dozens of ghostwritten reviews and commentaries published in medical journals and journal supplements that were used to promote unproven benefits and downplay harms of Prempro—a brand of menopausal hormone therapy (HT)—and to cast competing therapies in a negative light. These articles were widely circulated to drug reps and doctors to disseminate the company’s marketing messages. The analysis appears in this week’s PLoS Medicine.

Wyeth used a medical education & communication company, DesignWrite, to produce ghostwritten articles in order to mitigate the perceived risks of breast cancer associated with HT, to defend the unsupported cardiovascular ‘‘benefits’’ of HT, and to promote off-label, unproven uses of HT such as the prevention of dementia, Parkinson’s disease, vision problems, and wrinkles, writes Fugh-Berman.

The analysis revealed that DesignWrite was paid US$25,000 to ghostwrite articles reporting clinical trials, including four manuscripts on the HOPE trials of low-dose Prempro. DesignWrite was also assigned to write 20 review articles about the drug, for which they were paid US$20,000 each.

The analysis concludes that “Given the growing evidence that ghostwriting has been used to promote HT and other highly promoted drugs, the medical profession must take steps to ensure that prescribers renounce participation in ghostwriting, and to ensure that unscrupulous relationships between industry and academia are avoided rather than courted.”

In July 2009, PLoS Medicine, represented by the public interest law firm Public Justice, and The New York Times acted as intervenors in litigation against menopausal hormone manufacturers by 14,000 plaintiffs whose claims related to the development of breast cancer while taking the hormone therapy Prempro (conjugated equine estrogens). This resulted in a US federal court decision to release approximately 1500 documents to the public. The Wyeth Ghostwriting Archive is available at http://www.plosmedicine.org/static/ghostwriting.action or through the UCSF Drug Information Document Archive at http://dida.library.ucsf.edu/documents.jsp

Funding: The author received no specific funding for this article.

Competing Interests: Dr. Fugh-Berman was a paid expert witness on behalf of plaintiffs in the litigation referred to in this paper. She was not paid for any part of researching or writing this paper. Dr. Fugh-Berman directs PharmedOut, a Georgetown University-based project founded with public money from the Attorney General Consumer and Prescriber Grant program and currently supported by individual donations.

Citation: Fugh-Berman AJ (2010) The Haunting of Medical Journals: How Ghostwriting Sold ‘‘HRT’’. PLoS Med 7(9): e1000335. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000335

(This blog largely lifted from the article press-release).

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Hold the Eggs When Ovulating

August 11th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling

Fascinating new research from the National Institutes of Health finds that women’s cholesterol levels correspond with cyclic changes in estrogen levels. Total cholesterol levels can vary by as much as 19% over the course of the cycle.

The researchers found that as the level of estrogen rises, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol also rises, peaking at the time of ovulation.

In a typical cycle, estrogen levels steadily increase as the egg cell matures, peaking just before ovulation. Previous studies have shown that taking formulations which contain estrogen — oral contraceptives or menopausal hormone therapy — can affect cholesterol levels. However, the results of studies examining the effects of naturally occurring hormone levels on cholesterol have not been conclusive. According to the NIH’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, high blood cholesterol levels raise the risk for heart disease.

. . . .


In contrast, total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels — as well as another form of blood fat known as triglycerides — declined as estrogen levels rose. The decline was not immediate, beginning a couple of days after the estrogen peak at ovulation.

These findings provide another reason for girls and women to learn to track their cycles, so their blood tests can be interpreted more precisely.

It also gives more weight to the frequent assertion of members of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research that menstruation matters — and is worthy of our study — in part because it is not an event isolated in the uterus and vagina, but a complex part of the endocrine system that has effects on health and well-being throughout a woman’s body.

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Posted in Health Care, Menstruation, New Research, ovulation | 1 Comment »

Hot Flash—Progesterone is an Effective Alternative to Estrogen

July 19th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling

Guest post by Jerilynn Prior, Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research

hot flash hellIt’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.

Late last fall when we broke to code on this study, we were ecstatic to discover that our trial was highly successful. After only three months’ therapy with Prometrium® (300 mg at bedtime daily) the 127 (of 133 randomized) women’s vasomotor symptoms score (VMS Score, combination of number of flushes times their intensity during the day and during sleep) was decreased by about 60% on progesterone compared to less than 30% decrease on placebo.

In early June we learned the answer to another important question: Does progesterone effectively treat intense VMS? The answer is yes! Although less than half all the treatment-seeking women in our study met the FDA’s criteria for more than 50 moderate-intense VMS/week, the 30 women who did who were randomized to Prometrium® showed significantly more improvement in hot flushes than did women on placebo.

What were the reactions to this news? Some local doctors said they already knew that progesterone was good for VMS! Others people were curious, or skeptical but many realized the importance of providing women with an effective alternative to estrogen for VMS. Other reactions were predictable—many questions about whether this couldn’t really be explained, somehow, by estrogen (Prometrium® is converted into estrogen—not!). And there were several questions about side effects and alleged serious health risks from progesterone (wrongly attributed because of confusion of progesterone with synthetic progestins). Happily I was able to respond that participants had no serious negative effects—more placebo-treated than Prometrium®-treated women dropped out before completion. And it is likely that in estrogen-treated women progesterone decreases breast cancer risk rather than increasing it as medroxyprogesterone does (2). Because of Prometrium®’s significant sleep benefit (3), some women who entered the trial sleep-deprived experienced short-lived morning drowsiness. But the estrogen myth-related mood, bloating, weight gain, migraine headaches, and breast tenderness did not occur.

An epic journey for me, Chris, and CeMCOR ends in triumph. Now that the dust has settled, I am so grateful that CeMCOR’s many researchers over the last six years dedicated themselves to a world class trial, that local donors made the trial possible, and that the Prometrium® and placebo were provided by Schering Canada (for the first two years) and subsequently by the world-wide manufacturer, Besins Healthcare of Belgium.  Continue reading...

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Posted in Menopause, New Research, Pharmaceutical | 1 Comment »

Latest News on Hormone Therapy

June 23rd, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Wellcome Library, London // CC 2.0

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.”


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Hooked on Estrogen

May 13th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling

Guest Post by Jerilynn Prior, M.D.,  Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research

Estrogen moleculeYes! 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.

Rat brains are not the focus of my research—and I generally think rodents aren’t much like women. However, the animal evidence showing that estrogen increases addictive behaviours is strong and extensive. About a year ago I had occasion to visit a recovery facility for women with addictions—it suddenly struck me that most of the women there were perimenopausal. They were experiencing estrogen’s highs and the roller coasters and because normal ovulation is rare in perimenopause they were not having enough progesterone—and battling drug dependence. Sure enough, as Anthes states, hundred of experiments show that female rats become addicted more quickly than male rats, are less likely to become addicted without their ovaries but the quick-dependence problem returns when they are given estrogen (3).

As Anthes reports, it is exciting from animal data that progesterone assists to prevent or treat addictions. However, even more important is the notion that progesterone can assist in addiction recovery—not just in rats but in women. The data strongly suggest that progesterone aids women trying to stop cigarettes (4). Progesterone also appears to decrease the drug “high,” and certain actions of cocaine such as fast heart rate in women who are addicted (5). That was true whether cocaine was administered in the luteal phase (when progesterone is normally high) compared with the estrogen-dominant follicular phase, or when progesterone or placebo were administered to women in the follicular phase (5).

The effect of stress can add another layer of understanding to the addiction arena. We know that estrogen amplifies the responses of the stress hormones ACTH, cortisol and norepinephrine to social stress (ironically, based on a randomized, placebo-controlled trial in men) (6). Could that be one of the reasons estrogen increases women’s addiction susceptibility? It is known but rarely discussed that stress makes both addictive behaviors and hot flushes worse. Progesterone’s positive role in both addictions and hot flush treatment may be because of its effects to improve sleep and decrease anxiety. Two different randomized, placebo-controlled, double masked (neither researchers nor participants knew the identity of the pills) trials show that oral micronized progesterone (Prometrium—300 mg at bedtime) improves sleep without a morning hangover (7), and decreases anxiety in women with premenstrual symptoms (8). These actions may play important roles in progesterone’s potential use as a treatment for addictions and for hot flushes.  Continue reading...

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Posted in anatomy, magazines, Menopause, New Research | 4 Comments »

Estrogen is the New Ritalin. NOT.

May 10th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling

Guest Post by Barbara Sommer, University of California-Davis

Ritalin bottle with tabletsWhy is it that assertions about hormones and behavior lead us to readily suspend our capacity for critical thought? It seems like folks will accept just about any assertion with regard to the power of estrogen and the fluctuation of the menstrual cycle.

My observations over several decades (I am nearly forty years post-doctorate) have been reassuring. I have not seen women crushed in the working and professional worlds by the demands of their physiology. In fact it looks like women might be moving towards running the world, at least in those areas where they have access to education. Nevertheless, it rankles when a journal of some credibility makes assertions based on scanty evidence.

It is difficult to evaluate the quality of the research underlying the claims of the article “Is Estrogen The New Ritalin?” in the current issue of Scientific American: Mind. The title is cute. A writer for the New Yorker recently claimed that “White is the New Black.” Do we believe it? The article was provocative, and did not pretend to be a scientific piece of work. In contrast, the estrogen piece, by appearing under the prestigious banner of the Scientific American, carries an imprint of scientific credibility. The first paragraph claims the menstrual cycle might affect the brain as much as caffeine, methamphetamines, and Ritalin. Nowhere in the study is there any indication that estrogen levels or even menstrual fluctuation effects were actually compared with the above substances. The author also claims that this study is “the first to show that cognition is tied to estrogen levels in people” – perhaps the first because no one else has done a good job of it, but certainly not for a failing to try. There are many published studies claiming that estrogen affects cognitive function.

The central problem with this report is that the scientific community has not vetted the research. There is nothing to suggest that it was subject to review. It has not been published – at least nowhere that could be found by this writer with access to a university library. I don’t expect a popular version of scientific research to include information about whether there were adequate controls for subject selection, for practice effects on the task performance, or that the claim of population dopamine levels was accurate, and whatever measure was used to estimate estrogen levels was reliable. But someone needs to have looked at those aspects of the research. Without that, we end up with questionable conclusions at best, and junk science at worst.

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Neurology and steroid hormones – where is progesterone in this discussion?

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.

So, in a free-wheeling article about how scientists are exploring possibilities, it’s interesting that the possibilities seem to be limited by a cultural bias towards estrogen.

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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.