Bioidentical Hormones - U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging

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The progesterone that we make naturally, in the second half of our cycle when
we're young, protects us from cancer on the molecular level. Natural progesterone is a
genomic effecterfor apoptosis. (In English: natural progesterone latches on to switches
on the genes called promoter regions for "cell suicide."). Cell suicide is the mechanism
thaticauses the death of the one for the good of the many. Natural progesterone in a
normal menstrual cycle controls the destruction phase which kicks in about half way
through your cycle when no conception has occurred.
It's only when the fat lady never sings and the opera never ends, when we stop
popping eggs and producing progesterone regularly as we head toward menopause -- that
estrogen can continue to grow cells unchecked.
And this doesn't just happen in the uterus, either.
These rapidly multiplying estrogen-driven cells exist in our breasts and brain, too,
and they have progesterone receptors on them. The receptors are waiting for
progesterone to signal the final act. The chemical listening for that signal from
progesterone will go on indefinitely as long as estrogen continues to pour, unless we
artificially drop the curtain on the show by replacng from the outside thc nabtr
hormones we lack.
Does estrogen cause cancer? No or all young women would be dead.
Can estrogen cause cancer? Yes, but only in the absence of progesterone.
Cells, fed by estrogen and insulin that continue to grow in the absence of
progesterone past a programmed growth phase, have all sorts of potential for genetic and
immunological mistakes to be made.
We call those mistakes cancer.
In reality, the mutational changes that are the hallmark of metastatic cancer are
not caused by mistakes during repeated cellular divisions or assaults by toxic pollutants,
rather those changes are caused by the fall-off of regulatory hormones that control the
switches on your very DNA for the growth and death ofyour cells.
(see abstracts Formby/Wiley)
Knowing that progesterone deprivation is the key to cancer at midlife for women
makes the research showing that women who have given birth multiple times, and
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