Timing of HRT is VITALLY Important
The Menopause Society met last week and one of the most important take-aways involved timing of hormone therapy. The Society presented on October 21st, 2025 that a new large-scale analysis shows promising long-term benefits by starting hormone therapy in the perimenopausal years instead of waiting for full cessation of menses and official menopause.
This has been the assumption in the menopause world for sometime and makes a lot of sense if we look at the physiological effects that drops in estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone have. Let’s use an example of an athlete in a marathon. We wouldn’t advise that person to hydrate before the race started, then skip every water station until the twenty-first mile. That would really mean that athlete would have to make up the fluids lost and then hydrate enough to finish the race, it would be really hard to catch up. The same may be true for these hormones. If we can maintain some semblance of a woman’s normal levels, she may transition through the timeframe and also provide significant preventative effects to her bones, brain and heart.
We know that the menopause transition can have effects like increased risks of cardiovascular disease, dementia, and osteoporosis. Prevention really means timing is essential because we know that once something is lost or poorly controlled, it becomes exponentially harder to improve it (think bad cholesterol without using statins!). How life-changing could this new thought be if women starting estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, or all three when it really made the greatest impact? We could see less debilitating osteoporotic fractures, cardiovascular disease could potentially reduce, and women may not suffer with dementia at rates now seen! Those would be tremendous boosts to our longevity and society, in general!
So if you are a woman in her early 40s and you want to be proactive for your future self, please consider making an appointment and discussing all the possibilities of early intervention.
