Dr. Mary Claire Haver

And if your goal is not to have a vertebral fracture and have horrible back pain like your mom did or have a hip fracture and end up with a horrible quality of life,

you know, or have long bone fracture in the arm because you just kind of tripped and fell one day.

If you want to limit those risks, you know, you need to know what your baseline bone density is because we can start making changes in perimenopause to support your bone and muscle strength so that you don't have as high a risk as you age.

You can actually grow bone at any age, but it does take work and it takes understanding what your starting baseline is.

So estrogen plays so many roles in the body, but I want to focus on kind of what I call my top five.

And this is what I talked about a lot in the new perimenopause.

We're going to talk about brain.

We're going to talk about heart, muscle and bone, liver, and our immune system.

So in our brain, the sex hormones or the progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone have direct effects on our neurotransmitters.

How we produce things like dopamine and serotonin, these chemical messengers that hop from neuron to neuron in the brain, and why we have memory, why we have mood, why we have anxiety is directly related to these chemical messengers.

And when we lose estrogen and lose progesterone, we see changes that quite often will be severe mood changes.

anxiety and depression are the top two.

We see changes in the processing speed in certain areas of our brain.

The way we process glucose changes, amazing work done by Dr. Lisa Moscone, looking at energy metabolism in the brain across the menopause transition.

And there are certain areas of the brain to do with memory.

and cognition that change dramatically across the menopause transition.

Estrogen is involved in our strength, like we talked about in our bone, and in energy use in both, and in our liver, in fat and glucose metabolism.

And then our immune system, it's directly tied to inflammation control.

These estrogen receptors, both alpha and beta receptors, are...

everywhere.