10 Quotes by Mache Seibel

Heart disease—not breast or any other cancer—is the number-one killer of women over age 65 and the second leading cause of death among women aged 45 to 64. Women account for 52 percent of the 80 million Americans who have heart disease and who die from heart disease and heart attacks.

It’s not your age but rather how many years since you went through menopause that determines whether estrogen will be protective or harmful. The longer you go without estrogen, the more plaque there will be in your arteries and the greater the risk of heart attack and blood clots. Starting estrogen close to the time of menopause results in fewer deaths from heart disease.

After menopause, especially after early menopause, lowered estrogen levels translate into a lower and less-oxygen-rich blood supply to the brain, and as you can imagine, this can have some pretty serious side effects, including an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Yet you can create an estrogen fix and reduce this risk back to normal by taking supplemental estrogen during your estrogen window.

A study found that women who took estrogen within 5 years of menopause (a finding that dovetails neatly with The Estrogen Fix) had a 30 percent lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s. On the other hand, women who waited and took estrogen at age 65 or later, once their estrogen window had passed, had a 70 percent greater risk of developing the disease. So once again, timing really is everything when it comes to estrogen replacement and the long-term health of your brain and cognitive functioning.

Estrogen is believed to play a role in keeping calcium deposits from building up in arteries, which may explain why the rate of heart attacks increases in women 10 years after menopause.

Menopausal women have three times the number of falls as men of a comparable age. Taking estrogen decreased the risk of falling by up to 60 percent over a group of women who didn’t take it, according to one study. Falls are the leading cause of both fatal and nonfatal injuries among aging adults. Combine this with lower estrogen levels and its contribution to osteoporosis and you begin to understand why the benefits of estrogen on both balance and reaction time in the brain are so important.

Falling estrogen levels also increase a woman’s risk of heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and other cognitive issues, and osteoporosis and resulting bone fractures. These dangerous conditions come with the risk of two unpleasant side effects: lower quality of life and premature death.

Without estrogen women tend to have greater muscle loss, larger amounts of fat, thinner bones, and weight gain with aging, it’s clear that unless women eat healthfully, exercise, and possibly use estrogen, the end result is overweight women with sarcopenic obesity. You cannot sit this one out.

In general, the estrogen window is a decade-long time frame between the ages of 50 and 60, or 10 years from the time of menopause.