Women and Depression What Molecular Biology is Discovering about the Female Brain that Improves Treatment

Book Review
'The Estrogen Errors. Why Progesterone is Better for Women's Health' (2009). Susan Baxter PhD & Jerilynn C. Prior MD

An alternate title to this book could be 'Don't Go to the Doctor's Office without Me'. You get the strong impression that, outside of baby-production, the physiology and health requirements of the human female throughout the rest of her life cycle are simply not taught to physicians.

The co-author, J.C. Prior, is a physician-researcher, professor of endocrinology and top medical authority on mid-life female transition from fertile to sterile. She tells of her up-hill battle to teach University of British Columbia medical students the mounting evidence that progesterone is equally as important as estrogen to bone health. The administration has asked her to drop replicated progesterone research from her week of teaching bone disease. She states they will have to fire her first.

Time after time Prior over-rides the disinterest and obstructing ignorance of her peer medical community. She choses the difficult, but higher, road of practicing evidence-based medicine causing her to question the sketchy research on estrogen.

This book is shot through with more science, intelligence and rational sense, in terms of women's health, than anything else available currently. This is true of all her other publications and website www.cemcor.ubc.ca.

'The Estrogen Errors' is expensive, $85(Can)a copy, however a portion goes to running the non-profit cemcor website. The book gives you the most current science on women's bone, breast and heart health from Prior's researched and elite point of view.

A major focus of the book is that span of life starting in the late 30s or early 40s which has only recently been recognized and labeled perimenopause. A significant cohort of women, but not all women, have from mild to exteme difficulty through what can be a decade (plus or minus) of transition. If this is you, get this book and go right to chapter 3 'Perimenopause: The Forgotten Transition' for the very best science-driven information and management available to the lay public.

The amount of morbidity (suffering and misery) and premature mortality (death) that women might be spared if this book were to be widely read and understood is scary to think about.



Feb 25 2010 - No Comments

Current Content
Life can throw rotten curves, which can amazingly work out for the best, in the end. In my late 30s, PMS (premenstrual syndrome) became extremely severe. Being an employee, with the inflexibility and rigidity that salaried work entails, became a hellish ordeal and living nightmare.

To regain quality of life, I decided I needed work with minimal restrictions. I moved to self-employment and invested in real estate. Today, at 53, I have properties & assets worth a fair amount. I am not rich, but definitely would not have amassed my current worth had I been able to comfortably stay in the waged labor force.

By my mid forties I had the affluence, time and educational prerequisite (4 year university degree in nursing) to go to the biomedical research literature and find out about PMS. This flow of events happened at an opportune time, my noticeably severe PMS was getting much worse.

The reason various doctors I consulted were unhelpful is best expressed by Sharon Begley, the science writer for the Wall Street Journal. On September 26, 2003 her column was titled Too Many Patients Never Reap the Benefits of Great Research. Doctors often fail to pass on the fruits of new research discoveries to patients. When asked why this failure frequently occurs, physicians cite lack of time and lack of access to research.

I searched the biomedical science literature (pubmed), the information that doctors (should) use and found a wealth of beneficial new research knowledge on PMS. (PMS is a triplet neuro-hormonal phenomenon, look for postpartum depression and difficult/long perimenopausal transition as well.) I published the new information in two documents available for purchase/downloading from the left-hand side of this page.

Questions to femalebrain.com brought the misery of PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome) to my attention. A document with great science news about this genetic phenomenon is also available from the left margin.

Bouts of fatness have plagued my adult life. Just as I was finishing my degree in 1976, Harvard University commenced an enormous study of 100,000 nurses, appropriately called the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS). Thirty years later and still ongoing, the NHS has recently delivered the best information available on specific foods and lifestyle that correlate with slimness. The beneficial research from the NHS and other anti-obesity discoveries are in my newest publication Fatness in Women: How to get Control & Eliminate this Phenomenon.

If your doctor restricts you to one or two questions per visit you might consider femalebrain.com’s Get Answers Service as an ancillary means of information gathering. By searching the medical literature (pubmed) staff and I can augment, or find out first hand, practically anything you want to know and cite the journal source(s). Also, please scroll through the 50+ pages of FAQs , News section, and Links page.



Sincerely

Heather Ewart
Jan 01 2009 - No Comments