Hormone health: Could testosterone be the new Botox for women?

Photo: getty

Hormonal health is about much more than how grumpy we get when it’s that time of the month, or being a certain age. From our waist measurements to the way our skin ages, to how much sex we want and even our concentration levels, a complex, ever-changing balance of hormones influences every biological process in our bodies.

No wonder that hormone therapy is one of the buzziest areas in medicine right now. And for women in their 40s and up, it is being touted as an energy-boosting, anti-ageing, body-changing, sex-life-fixing cure-all.

For example, a recent study found that vaginally applied oestrogen could work wonders for dryness or pain during intercourse. While another found that, in pill form, it could help reverse arthritis. Researchers have also found that giving injections of growth hormone (a hormone our body stops making as we get older) to post-menopausal patients with osteoporosis could help reduce their rate of fractures.

Many doctors and health practitioners claim that simple lifestyle measures can help redress hormone imbalances  Photo: getty

But it’s not all about pills and jabs. Many doctors and health practitioners claim that simple lifestyle measures can help redress hormone imbalances and improve your overall wellbeing – from how we gain or lose weight to how we age, or simply how we feel day-to-day. Here’s the hormonal low-down…

What exactly are hormones?

The body’s chemical messengers, hormones act as fuel for all our bodily processes – metabolism, digestion, energy levels, how we deal with stress, our moods, curves and skin. More than 100 hormones keep our bodies running smoothly, but as we get older things can go awry, causing a catalogue of often ambiguous symptoms that most of us might grudgingly attribute to middle age.

For London-based anti-ageing specialist Dr Daniel Sister, who treats women’s hormonal imbalances, the typical patient is in her mid-40s and can’t quite pinpoint what’s wrong – and nor can her doctor. “She might have become more constipated, her skin and hair may be drier than usual and her libido out the window. Sometimes it isn’t the menopause, but other imbalances.”

Dull, thinning hair and unexplained constipation, for example, could be due to an underactive thyroid – a common problem for women, he says – as the thyroid governs 300 processes in the body. And if your stress hormones are in overdrive, that could impact the balance of sex hormones such as oestrogen and progesterone, and make you look and feel exhausted.

“More than likely, it’s a combination of various imbalances working together,’ says Dr Sister. ‘There’s no one-size-fits-all.”

Testosterone: the anti-ageing bullet?

According to Dr Kathy Maupin, author of The Secret Female Hormone, most symptoms we associate with menopause are in fact related to testosterone deficiency.

“Women make three times as much testosterone as we do oestrogen and we have a lot of it when we’re young,’ she says. ‘But we stop producing it somewhere between 40 and 50, about 10 years before men stop making theirs. We see a gradual development of ambiguous symptoms such as lack of sex drive, loss of concentration, tiredness and weight gain, and think it’s just the lead-up to the menopause. But it’s often low testosterone.”

But testosterone supplementation can have side-effects, from excess body hair and spots to increased risk of heart attack, and in the UK, prescription patches and gel for women were withdrawn in 2012.

‘Women make three times as much testosterone as we do oestrogen’

Dr Kathy Maupin

Hormone health: Could testosterone be the new Botox for women?