Leading Women’s Health Doc from HER Place
Launches ‘Straight Truth about Hormones
Campaign’
TUCSON, Ariz. (Business Wire EON) May 1, 2007 --
One of the nation’s pioneering women’s
health physicians has embarked on a nationwide “Straight
Truth About Hormones Campaign,” pledging to
undo misinformation about hormone therapy that has plagued American
women for decades.
Noting that a recent French study and a newly updated U.S. government
study confirm what she has been saying publicly for many years,
Elizabeth Lee Vliet M.D. said she would begin a series of informational
appearances in cities across America to educate women about overall
hormone health. Times and locations will be announced later.
“Even the recent hormone headlines don’t
get it straight, and it’s time that the women
in America have access to information just as European women have had
for more than 30 years,” said Vliet, winner
of the Arizona Foundation for Women’s Voice
of Women award for 2007 and founder of HER Place (www.herplace.com),
a medical practice in Dallas and Tucson devoted to women’s
health. “We're in the most progressive
country in the world, yet American women are stuck in the 1960s when it
comes to information about hormones. I intend to change that.”
As part of the campaign, Vliet has created a nonprofit foundation,
Straight Truth About Hormones™ Inc., to
educate women on hormone use.
Vliet has taken action because of an April 3 announcement from the
National Institutes of Health reversing some of the more alarming
findings in its 2002 Women’s Health
Initiative (WHI) study. Vliet has contended all along that the WHI study
was seriously flawed.
Another recent study, known as ESTHER (short for Estrogen and
Thromboembolism Risk), supports Vliet’s
views. Funded primarily by French government health agencies, ESTHER
found that gels and patches are safer than pills for women undergoing
hormone therapy. Method of delivery is just one of several hormone
issues on which Americans have been misinformed, said Vliet, who also
espouses the use of FDA-approved bioidentical hormones over more
commonly used, horse-derived estrogens that were used in WHI.
“In the United States, the ESTHER study comes
as a surprise to women and most doctors,”
said Vliet, who prescribes gels, patches and other transdermal hormones
for most of her patients suffering from the symptoms of menopause. “But
European women and their doctors have known about the differences in
hormones for over 30 years, and I’ve been
writing about them since the early 1990s.”
ESTHER showed that women using estradiol gel or patches had no more
blood clots than women using no hormones at all (placebo). Women taking
oral estrogens were four times more likely to have a blood clot
than women using estrogen in a transdermal (through the skin) delivery.
Vliet has been a forceful speaker on the lecture circuit for years and
has authored six consumer books about hormone health, beginning with Screaming
to Be Heard: Hormone Connections Women Suspect And Doctors Ignore in
1995 (revised in 2001), The Savvy Woman’s
Guide to Testosterone (2005) and It’s My
Ovaries, Stupid! (2007). Her newest books are The Savvy Woman’s
Guide to Hormone Headlines and The Savvy Woman’s
Guide to Estrogen.
An estimated 4 million menopausal women use hormones to relieve hot
flashes, mood swings, diminished sex drive, depression, osteoporosis and
other symptoms. Of American women taking prescription hormones over the
last 50 years, 80 to 85 percent are given oral Premarin pills (a mixture
of horse estrogens) or Prempro (horse estrogens plus a potent synthetic
progestin). “These products contain hormones
that are quite different from the ones that women produce naturally,”
Vliet said.
European women, on the other hand, have traditionally used products that
contain bioidentical estradiol and progesterone, hormones that are
molecular copies of what the human body makes. Eighty percent of women
in France and Italy use transdermal forms of estradiol such as gels,
lotions or patches that have been approved by their regulatory bodies
(similar to the FDA in this country).
EstroGel, for example, was approved in France in 1974 and has been the
most widely used form of estradiol in Europe for three decades. When did
American women have access to this? Not until 30 years later, when the
FDA approved it in 2004. “So it seems the
French have handled women’s hormone therapy a
lot better than the Americans for a long, long time,”
Vliet said.
“How the hormones are delivered can be a
critical factor in risk,” Vliet said. Only
about 10 percent of American women use transdermal estradiol. “This
despite the fact British researchers first published studies in the
1970s showing reduced risk of blood clots with non-oral estrogen,”
Vliet said. She said she prescribes the transdermal route for up to 80
percent of her patients who need hormones. EstroGel, Estrasorb, Climara
and Vivelle DOT are among the transdermal options approved by the FDA in
the United States.
The primary difference between oral and transdermal delivery is that
oral estrogens must first be metabolized, or changed, in the liver,
Vliet said. This “first pass”
through the liver stimulates production of clotting factors and proteins
that lead to both negative effects (including possible blood clots) and
positive effects (such as an increase in HDL, or “good”
cholesterol). More information is available at www.herplace.com.
MULTIMEDIA GALLERY http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=5390233
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