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

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treatments for stroke, neurogenerative disease and brain trauma. She looked at natural
progesterone, creatine and magnesium. In her piece entitled, "Search for the Brain's First
Defense", she said "When under attack - from ischemic stroke, head trauma or many
degenerative diseases- a small cluster of affected brain cells basically commit suicide
and, in so doing, releasetoxins that kill offtheir neighbors indroves. Neurons tumble like
dominoes to their death in a process that can take hours (in a stroke or a head trauma) or
years (in Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease)".
But what if there were a simple way to fortify human neurons against the brain's
many disparate enemies? What if some safe, readily available compound, taken before or
just after a stroke or injury or even long before a neurodegenerative disease takes hold -
could protect the brain against many kinds of insults and injuries in both men and
women?
Progestrone's Not Just for Women Anymore
This summer, the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke is
expected to approve and fund a national clinical trial designed to see if high doses of
compounded progesterone, a hormone that is present in all human brains - can help
disrupt the rapid death of brain cells that frequently follows a trauma to the head. The
quest for neuroprotection is driven not only by a deepening understanding of how injury
and disease damage the human brain but, by a growing sense of urgency.
In the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, traumatic brain injury has become
widespread, a problem for which the military's medical establishment is poorly prepared.
Almost 1,900 U.S. soldiers have been treated for traumatic brain injury, and some
Pentagon estimates have suggested that as many as 28% of the 1.4 million troops that
have served in Iraq and Afghanistan may have sustained at least mild brain injury from
the concussive effects of bomb blast.
As the United States enters its fifth year of war and the U.S. military ponders a
world in which its troops will remain vulnerable to improvised explosive devices, the
Pentagon has become deeply interested in the science of neuroprotection. In July 2006,
the armed services' medical leaders huddled at a military installation outside Washington,