How Hormones Affect Heart Health for Women

While many women know that cardiovascular disease (heart attack and stroke) is the number one cause of death in women in the United States, most do not know how significant it is. If you add the 2nd, 3rd and 4th causes of death together they do not add up to the number of deaths from cardiovascular disease. Another important detail is that this increased risk does not really become a factor until a certain stage in life called menopause. Consequently, the majority of women go from having a very low risk of cardiovascular disease throughout their life until menopause, when it jumps significantly.

So why such a big jump in risk? What happens at menopause?

You are still eating the same foods, doing the same amount of exercise, and taking the same supplements! Many women can attest that more often it is not until they reach menopause that issues related to cholesterol, blood pressure or body weight become a concern. It begs the question, what happens?

It is the body’s declining production of hormones that significantly affects a woman’s health.

Due to the Women’s Health Initiative results in 2002 indicating that Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) could increase the risk of breast cancer and stroke, many women have been concerned about hormones in general. HRT was introduced over 40 years ago by doctors who knew the importance of a woman’s own hormones on health and believed that re-introducing them into the body, either synthetic or equine formulation, was the best way of reversing the ill effects from loss of hormones. Since then, we have seen that foreign hormones introduced into the body may have side effects, as well as concern over the amount of hormones introduced into the body, the form of administration and/or how long they should be taken. Another issue is the body needs to metabolize foreign hormones in order to make them available; consequently this can have an impact on liver and kidney function, in essence inversely affecting our body’s ability to detoxify. Also HRT is often just two hormones: estrogen and progesterone. It is typically not a patient-specific combination of all the hormones, which a woman may need.

What is understood and accepted is that throughout our life the body’s OWN hormones have supported a healthful state. This ability to support the body’s production of hormones is what makes Femmenessence so unique and exciting. Without introducing hormones into the body, it naturally supports the body’s own production of not one or two hormones, but ALL hormones.

So what do our own hormones do:

• Estrogen increases HDL “good cholesterol,” which reduces plaque build up and possible blockage in arteries.

• Estrogen reduces LDL “bad cholesterol,” which can cause plaque build up and possible blockages in arteries.

• Estrogen also maintains the elasticity of arteries and blood vessels. Triglycerides may contribute to hardening of the arteries or thickening of the artery walls, which increases the risk of heart disease.

• Progesterone protects arteries from spasms. Women’s arteries are much smaller than a man’s and spasms of heart arteries can adversely affect blood flow to the heart.

• Adrenal hormones like cortisol, testosterone, and DHEA, affect sleep, energy, hair growth, muscle growth, and weight just to name a few. Adrenal fatigue and the biological effects of stress, mediated by hormones produced in the adrenal glands, plays a major role in obesity and its deadly consequences, including inflammation, insulin resistance, hypertension, atherosclerosis, and other conditions that together constitute “metabolic syndrome.”

• Thyroid Hormones control how quickly the body burns energy, makes proteins and how sensitive the body should be to other hormones.

Not only does Femmenessence™ create the optimal hormone balance by positively impacting estrogen, progesterone, thyroid, adrenal levels, and reducing FSH levels, but in our double blind placebo controlled clinical trials we saw it increase HDL, reduce LDL, reduce body weight, reduce triglycerides, and empirically we have seen it improve blood pressure from long term use.

It is important to note that there is no such thing as a magic bullet and Femmenessence isn’t the sole answer. Exercise, healthy diet and emotional support are also important. Dr Christiane Northrup in the Wisdom of Menopause talks about the part emotional stress plays in this equation. “Emotions such as depression, anxiety, panic, and grief have been shown to cause constriction in blood vessels, thereby impeding the free flow of blood. And anything that causes constriction in your blood vessels makes your heart and your vessels work harder to do their job. I’ve seen happy, joyful women with high cholesterol counts live healthy lives into their eighties and nineties, while much younger women whose lives were characterized by depression, anxiety, or hostility might have the first sign of heart disease symptoms in their early fifties despite normal cholesterol levels.”
Using Femmenessence™ for 3-4 months continuously should be the first step in creating the balance that promotes a healthy heart. Ideally it would be combined with emotional support, a stress reduction therapy like meditation, and a top quality fish oil, Niacin, and possibly CoQ10 .

• Fish Oil: Decreases the risk of irregular heartbeats that can lead to sudden cardiac death. Improves blood vessel function, decreases triglyceride levels, lowers blood pressure, and decreases the growth rate of plaques that clog arteries.

• CoQ10: Used mainly in heart conditions: congestive heart failure (CHF), heart attack, heart valvular disease and heart muscle disease.

• Niacin: Very effective in supporting lipid levels.

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