Consumer Review: DHEA Put An End To My Painful Peri-Menopausal Symptoms When Nothing Else Would Help.
I'm a 44 year old woman, and over the past couple of years I have been experiencing what I assume are perimenopausal symptoms: starting about 5 days into my menstrual cycle (no kidding!) I begin to experience severe symptoms of bloating, my breasts become enlarged & VERY painful. By mid-cycle (about 14 days) I felt like my period was due any day and started getting lower back pain which increased until my period started. I was, to put it simply, miserable. I even had to put off getting my annual mammogram because there was only a short window of a few days when my breasts weren't tender. My libido was nonexistent, needless to say. My periods were also very irregular -- I was so thankful if it came early, and desperate if it came late! I tried taking diuretics (about a package a month!) and they didn't help at all. I also tried pregnenolone cream, which helped a little the first month, less the second month, and not at all by the third month. When I mentioned these symptoms to my doctor, she just smiled and said "eat right, exercise more" -- she said she couldn't help me until I actually reached menopause.
One day, I read in "Woman's World" magazine that DHEA could help increase libido. I had nothing to lose, so I bought a bottle. That evening before bed I took two 25 mg DHEA pills. (I was about 14 days into my cycle and already bloated and tender and miserable, the day I started the DHEA.) When I woke up the next morning, I was SHOCKED to find that during the night the swelling in my breasts had COMPLETELY gone! The lumps were gone and my breasts were normal size again! My bloating was gone, my back pain and cramping was gone, and I felt completely normal for the first time in well over a year! I never expected anything like that! The article I read said it could take several months to see results as per libido so I was expecting NOTHING. Anyway, I've only been taking it for about three months now, so I'm not sure if or how long these effects will last, but I'm enjoying it while they do.
Response #1
The DHEA is probably being converted into progesterone. Progesterone is antagonistic to estrogen. (In other words, it balances the effect of estrogen.) Estrogen causes breast tenderness (fibrocystic breasts), bloating, weight gain, blood clots, and a whole host of problems. It is a huge fallacy that estrogen loss at menopause causes all of the symptoms associated with menopause. Estrogen levels drop about 40%-60%, but progesterone levels drop to zero at menopause, or even before menopause because women may experience anovulatory cycles, which means a woman is not ovulating each month. Without ovulation, the uterus does not produce progesterone (literally means pro-gest, or pro-gestation--before pregnancy). Without progesterone, a woman will experience estrogen dominance. Estrogen dominance will result in numerous symptoms that are usually associated with PMS and menopause.
You should be aware of how progesterone is used by either pre-menopausal or menopausal women. Menopausal women should use it for about 3 out of 4 weeks; pre-menopausal women should use it after day 10 or 12 of their cycle and stop 2 days before flow begins. If you take DHEA without a hormone holiday, then the DHEA may be converted into something else during that other period when you normally wouldn't have progesterone in your systems. That is, in a perfect world that would happen, but it is hard to say what hormone it is getting converted into. But, you could try using the progesterone cream; and if you want to increase other hormone levels (cortisone, DHEA, etc.), continue taking either DHEA (or pregnenolone).
Regardless of which hormone you use, it is always a good idea to take a holiday. Otherwise the chemical "loop" mechanism that tells your gland to stop making hormones will remain constant. If this goes on long enough, it could cause the gland to atrophy because of its inactivity. Another advantage to using a progesterone cream is that you can more easily calculate how much progesterone you are actually getting (some come in a pump dispenser that explains how many pumps to use, for example). And, being a cream, the progesterone is bypassing your liver. I don't know if the two 25 mg DHEA tablets you are taking are the sublingual form. The sublingual form would bypass your liver.
I would recommend that you get a book on the subject of female hormones, mainly because it is a complex subject, one that you should understand for purposes of supplementing. It is also a good idea to understand this subject because so much information out there is actually incorrect. Any book by John R. Lee, MD, would be an excellent choice; Dr. Lee has been researching this subject for more than 20 years.
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