Aging should be a slow and gradual process that gently eases you into each phase of your life. Unfortunately, for many of the more than one million women who enter menopause each year in the United States, this process is abrupt and dramatic.
Menopause is a hormonal transition that can bring about a tidal wave of health and wellness changes. While hot flashes, bone loss, and vaginal dryness may take center stage, there are other side effects, including a decline in skin health.
Here at Lafferty Family Care, Dr. Scott Lafferty and the team have had great success in helping women to weather this bumpy transition more smoothly with hormone replacement therapy (HRT), including bioidentical hormone pellets. We’ve found that these therapies can improve quality of life on many levels, including a cosmetic one, thanks to improved skin health.
Let’s take a look at why a key to your skin care regimen may lie in hormones.
When you transition through menopause, you face a number of potential side effects due to the sudden drop in your reproductive hormones including estrogen and progesterone. These side effects include:
As if these side effects weren’t difficult enough, many women experience changes in their skin health, such as:
Of course, it’s perfectly natural that your skin health declines over time, and the average age that a woman passes through menopause is 51. So, years of sun exposure and the natural aging process can certainly take their tolls.
That said, many women report feeling like they’ve aged overnight thanks to sagging and wrinkling skin that appeared during and after menopause. And there’s some good science that backs their findings.
Your estrogen hormones task themselves with a number of different biological functions, from releasing your eggs to maintaining your more female characteristics. Included in this mix is your dermal health.
When you pass through menopause and lose these hormones, namely estradiol, studies show that your skin faces losses in:
This loss occurs in all of your tissues, which is why so many women encounter vaginal dryness and thinning vaginal walls. Externally, your tissues can appear more wrinkled, drier, and more lax.
So, when these internal forces meet the external aging forces that highly visible areas like your face encounter, the result is that, all of a sudden, you appear much older than you feel.
While fighting back through a good skin care routine is important, we can help you push back from the inside on a hormonal level. Through hormone replacement therapy, we can bring your levels of estrogens back up to promote healthier skin.
If you’d like to determine whether hormone replacement therapy can make a valuable addition to your skin care regimen, please contact our office in Bentonville, Arkansas, to set up a consultation.
