GynoFiles

Miscarriages, besides being emotionally draining for any couple who have experienced one, are common and often not well understood. Progesterone hormone has to support an early pregnancy. It is the signal for the lining not to shed as it would for a typical menstrual period, and the early progesterone is produced by the corpus luteum of the ovary. Nature has designed this ovarian production as the back up to the placental production of progesterone, and each will help to replace any lack of  progesterone production occurring early in a pregnancy. It's always been thought that very early on in the first days to couple of weeks of pregnancy there just isn't enough placenta to support that uterine lining and prevent it from shedding. The ovary is designed to filling in with some extra progesterone production Yet as the pregnancy progresses, a healthy pregnancy will have a healthy placenta, and it will begin making enough progesterone to support the pregnancy even if the...

Many women want to treat their menopause completely naturally: no treatment at all. Others want therapies from nature: such as plant hormones. Plant hormones are tried for a variety of gyno treatments. No end to the talk (or YAMmer)  of Yams and hormones, be the talk estrogen or progesterone. A reader sent me this web quote. "The Yoruba, a large Nigerian ethnic group, have the highest rate of twinning in the world, at 45 twins per 1,000 live births. Some researchers have claimed this may be because of high consumption of a specific type of yam, Dioscorea rotundata or white yam containing a natural hormone phytoestrogen which may stimulate the ovaries to release an egg from each side." This yam is more commonly called the Kokoro, and it's commonly in the diet of  in Benin and Togo as well as Nigeria. Usually the talk is of the yams producing progesterone, and it is true the Yams do contain progesterone precursors, and serve as a cheap source of progesterone an...

Not all cases of uterine cancer can be avoided, but the top ways to avoid uterine cancer are Have a baby Take birth control pills, for each year additional protection is afforded against ovarian and uterine cancer Use Progesterone Use a Progesterone IUD Diagnose and Treat all precancerous conditions of the uterus such as polyps, and uterine lining thickening also called hyperplasia Prevent and Control Obesity  Insulin Resistance Exercise,  more than 50% of all women do not get enough exercise to protect themselves against endometrial cancer Drink coffee Moderate the amount  alcohol intake Continue to have regular pap smears, more and more pap tests are improving uterine cancer detection as they become sensitive for picking up uterine cells, not just a cervical cancer test The uterine wall is a muscle, and the lining tissue is very different stuff, it’s called the endometrium. Endometrium is shed monthly and it regenerates, this propensity to grow...

Safety and effectiveness is what women want in their menopausal therapies. Yam cream is a hormone therapy for the signs and symptoms of menopause . Yams contain a plant progesterone. More accurately, phytoprogesterone , there are no actual human progesterone in a product that only contains a yam source of progesterone. Thus, a yam cream is not technically a bioidentical in the sense of bioidentical for humans, but it is a natural hormone in one sense, and that term bioidentical gets extended to these products by some people. The term wild yam, is the common name for a plant that is more accurately called the Dioscorea villosa. It can be cultivated, and the creams are no t t ypically made from plants foraged from the wild.   The yams also contain plant saponins which may be able to affect sour ability to produce estrogen. In menopause, it's not likely that a yam cream will help the production of estrogen from an ovary that has essentially run out of eggs and run out of the abilit...

Hot flashes (HF) bother sleep and lead menopausal women to have less restorative sleep. Insomnia from hot flashes can cause delayed time to sleep or night time awakening. Once you have poor sleep you are likely to report other symptoms of lack of sleep including: daytime fatigue or feeling poorly, lack of concentration or memory impairment, poor performance at work, irritability, day time sleepiness, lack of motivation, headaches or even stomach or bowel upset. Simple sleep deprivation doesn't usually cause distress, and is better tolerated, than sleep lost to actual insomnia. Most, but not all, sleep studies have shown that women with hot flashes get poor sleep. We get the most hot flashes in the first part of the night, and there is some relationship between when the flash occurs and when you will wake up. Sleep therefore, is essential for your immune system, your hormonal health, your moods, thinking and your weight! The more bothersome to you the more likely ...

Singapore Botanical Gardens There is no upper age limit on the label of your birth control pill pack, but sooner or later you won't need hormone ovulation control, and you are wondering when do you stop your birth control pills? No one wants an unplanned pregnancy late in life; thus keeping on contraception is one of the bigger topics of discussion when we plan when to take women off their oral contraceptive pills. You hit 40 and thought you were too old for your pills, but you didn’t smoke, and had no contraindications to the pill, and you found out from your gyno that many women safely use their pills into their early fifties and it can be a great treatment for perimenopausal symptoms. And others, who had not been on birth control pills up until 40 are finding out that oral contraceptive pills can be a great way to begin to control irregular cycles and PMS symptoms as you enter the menopausal transition. So now that you got the black balloon treatment from your gal pals ...

There are literally dozens of birth control pills for us in the US to pick from, and we still don't have some that are the top world wide best birth control pill sellers. Most oral contraceptive pills have an estrogen hormone component and a progesterone hormone component. In other posts we have discussed the fact that the dosage of the estrogen may vary, but up until recently all have the identical estrogen (except for one of the combined pills). The progesterone provides most of the contraceptive protection in birth control. Progesterone suppresses ovulation and changes the mucus of the cervix so sperm can't swim through the cervix, nor be stored in the cervical mucus glands. Some of these cervical  mucus effects occur instantly within hours of taking your very first birth control pill, but for full effect, more like a day or two. That is why oral contraceptive pill prescriptions do work promptly! The official stance is that 7 days of consecutive pill use makes you pregna...

Now that you are pregnant there are a flurry of tests your gyno is going to want to get, and we think about testing our blood type and checking for anemia and infections, but hormone testing? Did we need to check those? During fertility treatments and with patients having early pregnancy problems it’s very common to check progesterone levels, and occasionally we do use estrogen level checks. But checking testosterone or other male hormone levels has been typically reserved for the woman who is having irregular cycles, extra hair growth, changes in sexual function or acne problems, and largely ignored once women get pregnant. A group of Stanford University research physicians working in their department of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility began to wonder about the birthing problems they saw in their most infertile patient population: patients getting in vitro fertilization (IVF). In these patients babies that had more stillbirths, and early infant deaths, more preterm deli...

The lining of the uterus needs to be ready to have an embryo implant. What really makes the best uterus for pregnancy has been a topic of hot research. The uterus has the myometrium , or muscle layer, and an inner lining layer called the endometrium . Gynogab has pointed out that the hormone estrogen and the fact that it is necessary, at least, for that lining to be prepared . And we've discussed that the lining can be disrupted by polyps, endometriosis, lack of proper hormone stimulation, and fibroids, and that might not make the best environment for uterine implantation or more accurately  the best place for egg implantation to occur  . And we've discussed that in order to know if a pregnancy has gotten established it's important to watch hormone levels rise, but for most that just means watching the level of placental hormones.  But there is so much more to having a healthy lining, and a whole section of the September 2011 issue of Fertility and Sterility, the jo...

Dr. Russell Marker, one of the five founding fathers of the birth control pill, was probably more obsessed with yam based hormones than any one has ever been. Toiling away in the laboratory he worked tirelessly to find the right source of progesterone from yams. He had more than the right impetus to want to find that perfect progesterone producing yam. In 1935 he would need the ovaries from 2500 pregnant pigs just just to get 1 mg of  the progesterone, and he knew that would never work as a successful compound at that extravagant price. Just to put this in perspective for you: it takes 200 mg in a progesterone shot to bring a woman's period on! That would be 500,000 pigs for your little shot. Wow. Impressive! Ok, so Dr. Russell dug in with determination to find the right, and cheap, plant. He got excited about Beth's root, the core natural plant hormone ingredient in the menstrual relief of Lydia Pinkham's compound. Women of the day however hardly noticed the herbal p...

Women who have the muscle tumors of the uterus called uterine leiomyomata, and nicknamed fibroids often get pregnant and go to term. It's been thought that when women have more babies they are less likely to have problems with fibroids over time. It's not really been known if in fact that some women with fibroids actually never conceive and that this fact actually has confused our thinking about pregnancy's affect on the fibroids themselves. The fibroid lumps do grow in early pregnancy, and eventually they shrink, and about 3-6 months after a pregnancy they are about half the size that they were. A small group of women who were recently pregnant were studied in a NIH study published in the June 2011 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. A new finding was that users of the progesterone only pills seemed to have their fibroids shrink less even if they were breastfeeding. The fibroids that are in the lining of the uterus seem to shrink the most, and bl...

You hear the word progesterone used a lot. This general class of hormone, and it's synthetic varieties is about ubiquitous as any medication in current use. If a compound acts like a progesterone its classified as a "progestin" and this class of medicines is very broad and some form or other is in the birth control pill, its made by the ovary, it's made by the placenta, it's used to prevent miscarriages, its been a treatment for PMS, it's been used to bring on missing periods, to prevent preterm birth, and it's used to protect the uterus from estrogen use in menopausal hormone therapy. So when we say there is a tug of war out there of information on which is better to be taking, natural or synthetic, we want you to understand there is a lot of scientific evidence and some of it conflicting. In general you can think of two big classes of medicines if we are just talking about menopausal hormones: we are talking about Natural Progesterone vs Synthetic...

Blood testing of hormones can be complex, it depends upon what you want to know before we can recommend some tests over other tests. Some women want to know if they have a hormone imbalance, have a reason for excessive hair loss, reasons for weight gain, or wondering if they are menopausal by checking to see if they still make estrogen or have high levels of  (FSH) Follicle Stimulating Hormone, but more commonly what women really want to know is: are you still ovulating? Ultrasound tests can show that the ovary is forming those small cysts that the egg forms within, but a blood test can check for ovulation as well. The ovary releases it’s egg and then will form another cyst that releases your progesterone. Progesterone stabilizes the lining of the uterus so that the menstrual lining won’t shed (the period is stopped when you are newly pregnant) and the newly fertilized egg can implant. The amount of progesterone made is important, and high levels are probably necessary for the...

This may or may not be a case of premature cervical opening, but it's a case of the cervix dilated so that we see membranes bulging out of the cervix. If this happens at term, we're excited, labor is progressing. If it happens remote from term, it can be a problem. It can mean that the cervix is weak, and there are treatments that can save the baby, but action would have to be taken promptly. Cervical incompetence can come on very suddenly in pregnancy, with the only sign being subtle. There are some surgeries and some genetic predispositions that might make you more at risk. Prior to pregnancy make the cervix a discussion with your gyno! Women who become pregnant and have risk factors for this condition may need ultrasounds with cervical length measurements more frequently to measure the cervix and to check it's shape as well. If the cervix is getting short, or changing it's shape, or showing signs of opening, there are possible treatments, such as the use of vag...

Have you got a handle on your Timing of HT initiation? This might make a difference on what you do with your hormone therapy once you cross into menopause. It won't be the only decision, but it's going to be an important one. NAMS puts out it's position on hormone therap y and in a word, thumbs up, in two words, thumbs up, for women around the time of menopause. As you get older, if you didn't start, don't. The largest group of menopause clinicians which has been going for about 20 years began issuing statements on hormone therapy right after all the controversy about beginning hormones broke in 2000-2001. and in Oct 20002 they put out their first statement, and it's been updated to try to clarify the role of treating menopausal women with estrogen or progesterone or both. This statement doesn't cover an opinion on testosterone (they do have another paper on that), the SERMS, the plant based estrogen or the over the counter estrogens, but tries to give (ph...