Hormonal Replacement Therapy for Menopause

Video Transcript

"Hello my name is Dr. Susan Jewell and on behalf of Expert Village I'm going to talk to you about ways to live with menopause. Now in this particular clip we're going to talk about the important HRT treatment therapy that most women are prescribed by their physicians when they enter menopausal stage in their lives. Now what's HRT? Look at this board and let, let's see what the definition of HRT, well HRT is an acronym for Hormonal Replacement Therapy. Now this is a very popular treatment that doctors prescribe. It's a prescribed program to treat hormonal imbalance associated with menopause. Now there are several different things to understand about HRT therapy. Now you can get HRT therapy two ways. You can get with only estrogen in the therapy, that's all, that means that they're only prescribe estrogen for you for the treatment or you can get a combination of hormones in the therapy which is estrogen combined with other particular hormones like progesterone, estreen, progestin and testosterone. This combination is actually more recommended because then you're going to decrease your long exposure of estrogen or higher exposure to estrogen in the body or unopposed estrogen because unopposed estrogen puts you at higher risk to developing certain cancers like endometrial cancer. So combination therapy is usually the number one recommendation for women entering menopause. Now HRT is good because it helps the woman alleviate some of the symptoms of menopause and that is it helps with mood swings and hot flashes. It also helps women to maintain some memory because menopause women start to lose memory and a that's a one of the symptoms. So HRT helps with that and it helps with one of the conditions that you also find is vaginal dryness. That is a very common symptom that women experience when they go through menopause. Now what is the hormonal replacement schedule? Well there are two different schedules that the doctor can put you on. And that is called the cyclic schedule or the continuous schedule. Now the difference between the two is that in on a cyclic schedule you'll basically taking estrogen hormone twenty five days in a month and then on the twelfth day they going to add progesterone and with this particular treatment schedule you're going to, the woman is going to experience a period or bleeding like a monthly period, a menstrual period. So but that's induced, you know, synthetically it's not natural so the other schedule is the continuous schedule which means that you basically taking estrogen everyday."