This post is not about rapa, per se, but it is about the decision process each of us has had to go through to figure out whether this (or other) intervention is a good one for them personally.
I am considering restarting estradiol (patch). I am now 76 and had a very tiny, very indolent hormone driven breast cancer six years ago.
I used estradiol for about 16 years starting early forties, early menopause, and osteoporosis. When my obgyn cut me off a few years after I had started taking, about 1998, I started sourcing it myself from Canada. (also took prometrium)
Stayed on it until diagnosed in 2020 at age 70. Glad now, very glad, to have taken it for so long.
I feel I have aged since I stoppped the estradiol. Energy, strength, and body composition.
The cancer was only 2 mm, and the Ki67 was 1%. Anything below 14% is considered not growing. (Cells, just before they divide, manifest this Ki67 protein on their membranes. I had virtually none.)
I think this was an iatrogenic breast cancer, caused by many, many biopsy needle pricks. None of the biopsies found any cancer but a few cells were found in the pathology post lumpectomy. Clear margins. I believe the needles punctured the ducts and released or pushed some of the in-situ cells out of the basement membrane. DCIS is not cancer, we now believe, but a “risk” for the development of cancer. I have now seen research that points to biopsies as a risk in just the way things happened to me. Cannot tell for certain, but “that’s my story. . . .” as they say.
I believe my greatest risk now and going forward, is frailty and sarcopenia, a hip fracture, a loss of muscle strength.
So, I have come to question whether I should look past the “guidance” and restart a low dose of estradiol (and prometrium).
This is either folly, and risky, or – it is a considered balancing of potential risks and rewards.
Interestingly, since the pendulum has now swung from totally abjuring estrogen after breast cancer, to a willingness to prescribe local vaginal estradiol (and I am on that now.)
Risks and rewards are inherent in most interventions, and doctors know it, but I do not think I could find any official providor who would let me have systemic estrogen, eg a patch. And yet, I keep thinking that it might be a good thing for me given the osteoporosis and my overall, catabolic make-up.
Long ago I read “Eat Right For Your Type,” (meaning blood type) which impressed upon me the importance of making decisions (in this case food, but why not medicines too?) based on your personal makeup. (The book described how the proteins that defined your blood type - A, B, O, AB, interacted with the proteins in foods.)
So, for example, I reluctantly decided not to take rapa because I felt it was not a good match with my “type” (older, “catabolic” and leery of infections like UTI’s). But estradiol just seems like it would be good for me, for the greatest threats I personally face.
Argue with me, please ----
