The Hormone Therapy That Reduces Breast Cancer Risk & More
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The Hormone Balancing Act
We’ve written before about menopausal HRT:
What You Should Have Been Told About Menopause Beforehand
…and even specifically about the considerations when it comes to breast cancer risk:
Menopausal Hormone Replacement Therapy
this really does bear reading, by the way—scroll down to the bit about breast cancer risk, because it’s not a simple increased/decreased risk; it can go either way, and which way it goes will depend on various factors including your medical history and what HRT, if any, you are taking.
Hormone Modulating Therapy
Hormone modulating therapy, henceforth HMT, is something a little different.
Instead of replacing hormones, as hormone replacement therapy does, guess what hormone modulating therapy does instead? That’s right…
MHT can modulate hormones by various means, but the one we’re going to talk about today does it by blocking estrogen receptors,
Isn’t that the opposite of what we want?
You would think so, but since for many people with an increased breast cancer risk, the presence of estrogen increases that risk, which leaves menopausal (peri- or post) people in an unfortunate situation, having to choose between increased breast cancer risk (with estrogen), or osteoporosis and increased dementia risk, amongst other problems (without).
However, the key here (in fact, that’s a very good analogy) is in how the blocker works. Hormones and their receptors are like keys and locks, meaning that the wrong-shaped hormone won’t accidentally trigger it. And when the right-shaped hormone comes along, it gets activated and the message (in this case, “do estrogenic stuff here!” gets conveyed). A blocker is sufficiently similar to fit into the receptor, without being so similar as to otherwise act as the hormone.
In this case, it has been found that HMT blocking estrogen receptors was sufficient to alleviate the breast cancer risk, while also being associated with a 7% lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease or related dementias, with that risk reduction being even greater for some demographics depending on race and age. Black women in the 65–74 age bracket enjoyed a 24% relative risk reduction, with white women of the same age getting an 11% relative risk reduction. Black women enjoyed the same benefits after that age, whereas white women starting it at that age did not get the same benefits. The conclusion drawn from this is that it’s good to start this at 65 if relevant and practicable, especially if white, because the protective effect is strongest when gained aged 65–69.
Here’s a pop-science article that goes into the details more deeply than we have room for here:
Hormone therapy for breast cancer linked with lower dementia risk
And here’s the paper itself; we highly recommend reading at least the abstract, because it goes into the numbers in much more detail than we reasonably can here. It’s a huge cohort study of 18,808 women aged 65 years or older, so this is highly relevant data:
Want to learn more?
If you’d like a much deeper understanding of breast cancer risk management, including in the context of hormone therapy, you might like this excellent book that we reviewed recently:
The Smart Woman’s Guide to Breast Cancer – by Dr. Jenn Simmons
Take care!
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Proteins Of The Week
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This week’s news round-up is, entirely by chance, somewhat protein-centric in one form or another. So, check out the bad, the very bad, the mostly good, the inconvenient, and the worst:
Mediterranean diet vs the menopause
Researchers looked at hundreds of women with an average age of 51, and took note of their dietary habits vs their menopause symptoms. Most of them were consuming soft drinks and red meat, and not good in terms of meeting the recommendations for key food groups including vegetables, legumes, fruit, fish and nuts, and there was an association between greater adherence to Mediterranean diet principles, and better health.
Read in full: Fewer soft drinks and less red meat may ease menopause symptoms: Study
Related: Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean Diet
Listeria in meat
This one’s not a study, but it is relevant important news. The headline pretty much says it all, so if you don’t eat meat, this isn’t one you need to worry about any further than that. If you do eat meat, though, you might want to check out the below article to find out whether the meat you eat might be carrying listeria:
Read in full: Almost 10 million pounds of meat recalled due to Listeria danger
Related: Frozen/Thawed/Refrozen Meat: How Much Is Safety, And How Much Is Taste?
Brawn and brain?
A study looked at cognitively healthy older adults (of whom, 57% women), and found an association between their muscle strength and their psychological wellbeing. Note that when we said “cognitively healthy”, this means being free from dementia etc—not necessarily psychologically health in all respects, such as also being free from depression and enjoying good self-esteem.
Read in full: Study links muscle strength and mental health in older adults
Related: Staying Strong: Tips To Prevent Muscle Loss With Age
The protein that blocks bone formation
This one’s more clinical but definitely of interest to any with osteoporosis or at high risk of osteoporosis. Researchers identified a specific protein that blocks osteoblast function, thus more of this protein means less bone production. Currently, this is not something that we as individuals can do anything about at home, but it is promising for future osteoporosis meds development.
Read in full: Protein blocking bone development could hold clues for future osteoporosis treatment
Related: Which Osteoporosis Medication, If Any, Is Right For You?
Rabies risk
People associate rabies with “rabid dogs”, but the biggest rabies threat is actually bats, and they don’t even need to necessarily bite you to confer the disease (it suffices to have licked the skin, for instance—and bats are basically sky-puppies who will lick anything). Because rabies has a 100% fatality rate in unvaccinated humans, this is very serious. This means that if you wake up and there’s a bat in the house, it doesn’t matter if it hasn’t bitten anyone; get thee to a hospital (where you can get the vaccine before the disease takes hold; this will still be very unpleasant but you’ll probably survive so long as you get the vaccine in time).
Read in full: What to know about bats and rabies
Related: Dodging Dengue In The US ← much less serious than rabies, but still not to be trifled with—particularly noteworthy if you’re in an area currently affected by floodwaters or even just unusually heavy rain, by the way, as this will leave standing water in which mosquitos breed.
Take care!
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Stolen Focus – by Johann Hari
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Having trouble concentrating for long periods? It’s not just a matter of getting older…
Johann Hari outlines twelve key ways in which our attention has not merely “wandered”, so much as it has been outright stolen.
By whom? For what purpose? Obvious culprits include social media and outrage-stoking news outlets, but the problem, as Hari illustrates, goes much deeper than that.
He talks about how we cannot truly multi-task, and can only switch beween tasks, at a cost. And yet, the modern world is not at all friendly to single-tasking!
Writer’s note: as I write this, I have active two screens, containing four windows, one of which has three tabs open. I am not multitasking; all those things pertain to the work I am doing right now. If I closed them between use, it’d only cost me more time and attention opening and closing them all the time. And yet, my working conditions are considered practically “hyperfocused” in this century!
- We learn about how the working world has changed, and the rise of physical and mental exhaustion that has come with it.
- We learn about the collapse of sustained reading, that started well before the modern Internet.
- We learn about factors such as dietary shifts that sap our energy too.
…and more. Twelve key things, remember.
But, it’s not all doom and gloom. There are things we can do to fight back. Some are personal changes; others are societal changes to push for.
The last part of the book is given over to, essentially, a manifesto (and how-to guide) for reclaiming our attention and thinking deeply again.
Bottom line: if you struggle with maintaining attention; this is a book for you. You might want to put your phone in a drawer while you read it, though
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Top 10 Causes Of High Blood Pressure
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As Dr. Frita Fisher explains, these are actually the top 10 known causes of high blood pressure. Number zero on the list would be “primary hypertension”, which means high blood pressure with no clear underlying cause.
Superficially, this feels a little like the sometime practice of writing the catch-all “heart failure” as the cause of death on a death certificate, because yes, that heart sure did stop beating. But in reality, primary hypertension is most likely often caused by such things as unmanaged chronic stress—something that doesn’t show up on most health screenings.
Dr. Fisher’s Top 10
- Thyroid disease: both hyperthyroidism and hypothyroidism can cause high blood pressure.
- Obstructive sleep apnea: characterized by snoring, daytime sleepiness, and headaches, this condition can lead to hypertension.
- Chronic kidney disease: diseases ranging from diabetic nephropathy to renal vascular disease can cause high blood pressure.
- Elevated cortisol levels: conditions like Cushing’s syndrome or disease, which involve high cortisol levels, can lead to hypertension—as can a lifestyle with a lot of chronic stress, but that’s less readily diagnosed as such than something one can tell from a blood test.
- Elevated aldosterone levels: excess aldosterone from the adrenal glands causes the body to retain salt and water, increasing blood pressure, because more stuff = more pressure.
- Brain tumor: tumors that increase intracranial pressure can cause a rise in blood pressure to ensure adequate brain perfusion. In these cases, the hypertension is keeping you alive—unless it kills you first. If this seems like a strange bodily response, remember that our bodily response to an infection is often fever, to kill off the infection which can’t survive at such high temperatures (but neither can we, so it becomes a game of chicken with our life on the line), so sometimes our body does kill us with one thing while trying to save us from another.
- Coarctation of the aorta: this congenital heart defect results in narrowing of the aorta, leading to hypertension, especially in the upper body.
- Pregnancy: pregnancy can either induce or worsen existing hypertension.
- Obesity: excess weight increases blood flow and pressure on arteries, raising the risk of hypertension and associated conditions, e.g. diabetes etc.
- Drugs: certain medications and recreational drugs (including, counterintuitively, alcohol!) can elevate blood pressure.
For more information on each of these, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Hypertension: Factors Far More Relevant Than Salt
Take care!
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Sweet Cinnamon vs Regular Cinnamon – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing sweet cinnamon to regular cinnamon, we picked the sweet.
Why?
In this case, it’s not close. One of them is health-giving and the other is poisonous (but still widely sold in supermarkets, especially in the US and Canada, because it is cheaper).
It’s worth noting that “regular cinnamon” is a bit of a misnomer, since sweet cinnamon is also called “true cinnamon”. The other cinnamon’s name is formally “cassia cinnamon”, but marketers don’t tend to call it that, preferring to calling it simply “cinnamon” and hope consumers won’t ask questions about what kind, because it’s cheaper.
Note: this too is especially true in the US and Canada, where for whatever reason sweet cinnamon seems to be more difficult to obtain than in the rest of the world.
In short, both cinnamons contain cinnamaldehyde and coumarin, but:
- Sweet/True cinnamon contains only trace amounts of coumarin
- Regular/Cassia cinnamon contains about 250x more coumarin
Coumarin is heptatotoxic, meaning it poisons the liver, and the recommended safe amount is 0.1mg/kg, so it’s easy to go over that with just a couple of teaspoons of cassia cinnamon.
You might be wondering: how can they get away with selling something that poisons the liver? In which case, see also: the alcohol aisle. Selling toxic things is very common; it just gets normalized a lot.
Cinnamaldehyde is responsible for cinnamon’s healthier properties, and is found in reasonable amounts in both cinnamons. There is about 50% more of it in the regular/cassia than in the sweet/true, but that doesn’t come close to offsetting the potential harm of its higher coumarin content.
Want to learn more?
You may like to read:
- A Tale Of Two Cinnamons ← this one has more of the science of coumarin toxicity, as well as discussing (and evidencing) cinnamaldehyde’s many healthful properties against inflammation, cancer, heart disease, neurodegeneration, etc
Enjoy!
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What I Wish People Knew About Dementia – by Dr. Wendy Mitchell
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We hear a lot from doctors who work with dementia patients; sometimes we hear from carers too. In this case, the author spent 20 years working for the NHS, before being diagnosed with young-onset dementia, at the age of 58. Like many health industry workers who got a life-changing diagnosis, she quickly found it wasn’t fun being on the other side of things, and vowed to spend her time researching, and raising awareness about, dementia.
Many people assume that once a person has dementia, they’re basically “gone before they’re gone”, which can rapidly become a self-fulfilling prophecy as that person finds themself isolated and—though this word isn’t usually used—objectified. Talked over, viewed (and treated) more as a problem than a person. Cared for hopefully, but again, often more as a patient than a person. If doctors struggle to find the time for the human side of things with most patients most of the time, this is only accentuated when someone needs more time and patience than average.
Instead, Dr. Mitchell—an honorary doctorate, by the way, awarded for her research—writes about what it’s actually like to be a human with dementia. Everything from her senses, how she eats, the experience of eating in care homes, the process of boiling an egg… To relationships, how care changes them, to the challenges of living alone. And communication, confusion, criticism, the language used by professionals, or how things are misrepresented in popular media. She also talks about the shifting sense of self, and brings it all together with gritty optimism.
The style is deeply personal, yet lucid and clear. While dementia is most strongly associated with memory loss and communication problems, this hasn’t affected her ability to write well (7 years into her diagnosis, in case you were wondering).
Bottom line: if you’d like to read a first-person view of dementia, then this is an excellent opportunity to understand it from the view of, as the subtitle goes, someone who knows.
Click here to check out What I Wish People Knew About Dementia, and then know those things!
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Greek Yogurt vs Cottage Cheese – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing Greek yogurt to cottage cheese, we picked the yogurt.
Why?
These are both dairy products popularly considered healthy, mostly for their high-protein, low-carb, low-fat profile. We’re going to assume that both were made without added sugars. Thus, their macro profiles are close to identical, and nothing between them there.
In the category of vitamins, both are a good source of some B vitamins, and neither are good source of much else. The B-vitamins they have most of, B2 and B12, Greek yogurt has more.
We’ll call this a small win for Greek yogurt.
As they are dairy products, you might have expected them to contain vitamin D—however (unless they have been artificially fortified, as is usually done with plant-based equivalents) they contain none or trace amounts only.
When it comes to minerals, both are reasonable sources of calcium, selenium, and phosphorus. Of these, they’re equal on the selenium, while cottage cheese has more phosphorus and Greek yogurt has more calcium.
Since it’s also a mineral (even if it’s usually one we’re more likely to be trying to get less of), it’s also worth noting here that cottage cheese is quite high in sodium, while Greek yogurt is not.
Another win for Greek yogurt.
Beyond those things, we’d be remiss not to mention that Greek yogurt contains plenty of probiotic bacteria, while cottage cheese does not.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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