Incredible Results with Hormone Replacement in Elderly

Interviewer: When we talk about bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, it's often has to do with women who are entering menopause, men in their late 40s, 50s. What about people that are older than that? Is there benefit for people that have, that are past those stages in their 60s, and 70s and beyond? 

Dr. Rosensweet: This is one of my favorite topics in the world of identicals and for the very reason that you mentioned and any physician that has, as I do, elderly parents and in-laws. This is how I discovered it.

A relative of mine that was in her late 90s, I'm sorry, late 80s. She was having trouble getting out of a chair and was having some cognitive decline and I know what that's from. I mean cognitive decline, this is a big subject. It is not a simple subject, but one of the well-known possibilities of cognitive decline is loss of Estrogen. So I administered her Estrogen and to her husband's absolute delight and gratitude, she reeled back from severe cognitive decline and she got about 80 percent of her function back.

That was my introduction. Then my mother-in-law who is just a delightful elderly woman, but she had a total Hysterectomy at the age of 30. She had three coronary, myocardial infarcs over the course of her lifetime. She had a triple bypass.

By the time I met her, she couldn't get out of a chair very well. She got up very feebly, and of course one day she was standing in her kitchen and she went to turn and she lost her balance. It made me think back to when I was in medical school and I was a senior and I was pretty, and I was just so grateful to be on the hospital wards and seeing patients and we had these academic classes as well and I'm sitting in a class with a gerontologist coming in to talk to us.
Someone who specializes in the elderly and I went, "Oh God, I'm a young guy and I'm not going to be dealing with old people and this is terrible." The gerontologist got up there and said, young arrogant guy that I was.

The gerontologist says, "Look, you guys have been through, you're almost through with medical school, you've been given a list of a thousand diagnostic possibilities and you know that they get more intense as a person gets older, but let me tell you what's really happening with most older people.

They're losing their muscles and they can't stand up and they've already lost a lot of bone and they fall onto those osteoporotic bones and they fracture. The name of this thing with the elderly is, Sarcopenia, which is loss of muscle mass and Osteoporosis. Take care of that." Of course he didn't tell us how. Sarcopenia is so much about the loss of Androgens.

Because I've tested these elderly people, I've tested women in their late 80's it is appalling how low those numbers are. For the woman who had fallen on her osteoporotic hip and also fractured her shoulder; turned her Humerus upside down. That's how osteoporotic the Humerus was and after six months of rehab and surgery, she was back in action she couldn't get out of a chair.

I started giving her Testosterone in those oils and she also had severe leg pain. This was a mystery to me, especially when she would try to go to sleep at night. This is well known. A lot of people have it. I said, "Let's just treat what she's got going on here." I gave her some Cortisol in one of those bottles too.

This woman, who was 89 years old at the time was, would ask me, "I'm running out of my bottles, don't want to run out of my bottles." Then I have her on video getting out of a chair doing, she had this big smile on her face and she's doing this with no hands.

She puts her hands out like this because after doing about six months of Testosterone and Cortisol she could do that. Oh gosh, the elderly, they get in these problems from diminished hormones, they lose their energy, they lose their strength, and they lose their mind and they lose their memory.

We developed this elder formula, we call it, this elder woman's formula and it's got Estrogen, it's got [inaudible], Progesterone, Testosterone, DHEA, Cortisol and Melatonin. I have never put together a combination of hormones. I find you have to titrate the doses independently and so it's hard to come up with a combination to do really good work that's verifiable by a 24-hour urine hormone testing.

In the elderly, the most you can ask of them is one pump. That's what we put them in a pump bottle. One pump per day onto their forearms. It's got all of them in there and it's a fairly radical approach, but risk benefit wise and the benefit of it. We're doing a study right now to do the testing, but we're already administering what we call elder woman formula to the elderly. We'll see how good a guess I made at the several different dosages in there, but its power packed.