research Archives - Hormones Matter

Breathe. Just Breathe.

Published on December 22, 2016

4084 views

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Or is it? Not to Bah Humbug in your peppermint mocha but the holidays can be really hard. While music and parties and family can be fun, they can just as often be stressful. The holiday season can trigger all kinds of feelings besides joy- loss, grief, sadness, nostalgia, and longing. You could counter all this stress and emotional weariness with meditation, but it may be hard to get Zen if you’re sleeping on a couch in a house full of relatives. Just like it may be a challenge to practice gratitude as you are struggling to figure out how to afford all the gifts you need to buy. Of course, you could use your yoga practice to destress but good luck finding the time and space to “become one with your body” as you are sitting in an airport or driving down the interstate.

So what can you do? How can you destress when you’re not sleeping in your own bed or fighting holiday traffic? What can you do when your well-meaning relatives ask you about your relationship status or when you’re going to have a baby? The one thing that you can do any time, any place… the one thing you MUST do, is BREATHE.

As for my credentials, I may know a thing or two about stress. Not because I had a stroke or because I’ve dealt with infertility or any of the other myriad of health issues I’ve experienced. I know about stress because when I’m not writing, I teach public speaking to college students. I can see the stress on their lovely, little, unlined faces every day. Particularly on speech days.

Why Breathe?

Yes, obviously so you don’t die. But what are the specific benefits of paying attention to the breath? This is the place where I usually bombard you with research like:

slow breathing lowers your blood pressure
deep breathing slows heart rate
breath control decreases stress response
yogic breathing helps fight major depression
breathing decisively reduces pain

Don’t just take my word for it, even The New York Times endorses breathing.

How to Breathe

Of course, you inhale and you exhale but there’s a little more to it when you practice conscious breathing.

Belly Breathing

If you have ever been to a yoga class, you’ve probably been asked to breathe down into your belly. Why? What does that even mean? Most of the time when we’re breathing unconsciously, we’re taking shallow breaths causing only the top of our chests to rise and fall. This doesn’t circulate much oxygen in our body. In order to practice belly breathing, or diaphragmatic breathing, begin to take deeper breaths, pulling the air down to the body and expanding the belly on the inhale, contracting it on the exhale. Though it’s referred to as belly breathing, the ultimate goal is to have you inhale into the entire chest cavity, expanding on all sides, and into the belly. This type of breathing massages the organs, strengthens the diaphragm, and allows more oxygen to circulate in your bloodstream. For my students, this type of breathing helps them not pass out when giving their speeches. For you, it can help you not chuck a glass of wassail at your loved one’s head when they begin to talk about politics.

Extended Exhale Breathing

One of my favorite breathing techniques is the extended exhale. When you exhale for longer than you inhale, you’re automatically calming the nervous system. This type of breathing is exactly what it sounds like: inhaling to the count of 3 or 4 then exhaling to the count of 5 or 6. You can also progressively lengthen both the inhale and the exhale, but focus on keeping the exhale longer, breathing out fully each time. While any time you’re concentrating on your breath, you are in the present moment, extended exhale breathing has the added benefit of counting. Do you know what you can’t do when you’re busy counting your inhales and exhales? For my students, it’s worry about your speech. For you, it’s worry about <insert the most stressful thing in your life here>. It’s nearly impossible to let your mind wander and become mired in anxiety when you have to count your breath. It’s also impossible to swear at the minivan that cut you off in holiday traffic when you are practicing extended exhale breathing.

Senobi Breathing

Senobi breathing is a technique involving stretching and breathing that has been shown to lessen depression and help with weight loss.

“After 1 min of the ‘Senobi breathing, substantial up-regulation of sympathetic nerve activity and increased urinary hormone secretion were observed in the overweight women but not in the healthy controls. Moreover, after repeating the exercise for a month, the obese patients showed significant loss of body fat. The ‘Senobi’ breathing exercise was found to be effective for weight loss.”

You can learn the technique here. So go ahead and have that second plate of holiday cookies. Then breathe and stretch your way into a new body for the new year.

Nadi Shodhana

Trying to do everything at once this holiday season—baking and shopping and wrapping? Try nadi shodhana or alternate nostril breathing. This technique is great for when you need to focus or find balance from too much multi-tasking. To practice alternate nostril breathing, you close your right nostril with your thumb or finger and inhale through the left nostril. Then you close your left nostril and exhale through the right. Keep the left nostril closed while you inhale back into the right nostril. Then close the right and exhale through the left. Keep the right nostril closed and inhale back into the left nostril. Then switch. Continue this pattern until you feel more centered. Find more detailed instructions here or you can watch a video explaining it here.

Sighing

Finally, if all of this sounds like something you’d roll your eyes at (though if it is you probably wouldn’t have read this far), know that you the sigh you just heaved at this article counts as breathing deeply. A 2010 study published in Physiology & Behavior found that “Spontaneous sighing is related to subjective relief of negative emotional states.”

According to researchers from Stanford and UCLA, “Heaving an unconscious sigh is a life-sustaining reflex that helps preserve lung function.” Which means the exasperation the holidays bring can help keep you healthy as long as you breathe. Just breathe.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Yes, I would like to support Hormones Matter.

Image by karmasprenger from Pixabay.

The Real Risk Birth Control Study: Take Charge, Find Answers

by Kerry Gretchen

Published on October 18, 2016

2525 views

I recently read an article about how fewer women are taking birth control pills now. The article claimed:

“The reasons behind the shift are hard to pin down. Study after study has shown the pill is generally safe for most women, and is 99 per cent effective with perfect use. The pill’s safety has only improved since it was introduced in 1960. It is perceptions that are changing.”

This is completely untrue. It wasn’t safe in 1960 and it certainly isn’t any safer now. It’s also not true that study after study has shown it to be safe. At the Nelson Pill Hearings, the 1970 congressional hearings on the safety of the birth control pill, every doctor that testified agreed that more research was necessary. Yet, every modern study I have found (from research on depression, weight gain, diabetes and more) has said that even more research is necessary to make any conclusions. So in the 46 years since, we still don’t adequately understand the risks with hormonal contraceptives. Dr. Paul Meier, who testified at the hearings, spoke about the challenges of conducting said research:

“Of far greater concern to me is the failure of our governmental agencies to exercise their responsibilities in seeing to it that appropriate studies were carried out… Frankly, the required research, although important, is not especially appealing to scientists. It is not fundamental and it is not exciting. It is difficult, it is expensive, and it is fraught with the risk of attack from all sides.
Evidently, for whatever reasons, there is no sound body of scientific studies concerning these possible effects available today, a situation which I regard as scandalous.
If we proceed in the future as we have in the past, we will continue to stumble from one tentative and inadequately supported conclusion to another, always relying on data which come to hand, and which were not designed for the purpose.”

We can see that what Dr. Meier warned against is exactly what has happened. Experts testified in 1970 that the pill was linked to depression and possibly suicide. They warned that the pill should not be given to women with a history of depression. Yet, in 2004 when I was depressed after switching my brand of pill, my doctor told me that wasn’t a side effect. It wasn’t until last month that a European study on hormonal contraception said what no American study has dared. The pill is irrefutably linked to depression.

Unfortunately, depression is only ONE of the side effects of hormonal birth control. Obviously, blood clots are one of the most dangerous and why we are looking at them with this research study. Other side effects that were warned about at the Nelson Pill Hearings but for which the current research claims even more research is necessary include: diabetes, weight gain, cancer, loss of libido, urinary tract and yeast infections, lupus, infertility, hypertension. So no, studies do not actually show that “the pill is generally safe.” What studies show is that there STILL needs to be more research. Well, if they haven’t done it in the past 46 years, when are they going to do it?

As for the pill’s safety improving, just look the increased risk with newer formulations. Third and fourth generation pills have significantly higher risk for deadly blood clots.

“The problems with Yaz and its sister pills stem from drospirenone, a fourth-generation progestin.
After years of blood clot reports, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), reviewed studies on oral contraceptives and found that an estimated 10 in 10,000 women on newer pills will experience a blood clot versus 6 in 10,000 with older pills.
Another study conducted by the French National Agency for the Safety of Drugs and Health Products (ANSM) found that birth control pills were linked to more than 2,500 cases of blood clots annually between 2000 and 2011. But third- and fourth-generation pills were responsible for twice as many deaths as earlier pills.
Two studies appeared in the British Medical Journal in 2011 and indicated newer pills were two to three times more likely to cause blood clots.”

Why would the pharmaceutical industry make newer birth control pills that are less safe? Maybe because once the patent runs out on medication they don’t make as much profit. So they change the formula and market it as a new and better pill. As history has shown though, there never seems to be enough research done before these products are approved. And women are paying the price. Dr. Ball warned of this at the Nelson Pill Hearings when he said (page 6500):

“Each time we change the dose or the chemical, you have a whole new ball game statistically, and then a long period of time has to go by for evaluation. Again, is it going to be just this unscientific, hand-out-the-pills-and-see-who-gets-sick business, which I say is wrong and which has been done. Each time there is a new pill, there is a new problem.”

Alas, that’s exactly the business that’s been taking place. Throw in the fact that doctors often dismiss the complaints from women as psychosomatic and you have a recipe for a completely misrepresented medication.

I don’t know about you but I’m tired of being a rube for the pharmaceutical industry. If we want to know what’s really going on with hormonal contraception, we’re going to have to start looking at it ourselves. We can’t wait for the government or the pharmaceutical industry to provide us with perfectly funded, unbiased research. They haven’t done that in the near 50 years since the Nelson Pill Hearings and there’s little indication they are going to start now. That’s why we’re conducting this research ourselves. We need information to help women assess what their REAL RISK is for taking a medication. Not what their doctors are telling them based on studies conducted by the pharmaceutical industry. The aim of this study is not to take away contraceptive options but to provide more accurate information about which women may have more risk for serious side effects like blood clots and which forms of hormonal contraception may be more dangerous than others.

It’s time to take charge of our health and find our own answers. That’s exactly what this research hopes to do but we need your help to do it. Please participate. And please share our study with those you know who might be willing to help. Thank you.

Take Charge: Participate in the Birth Control and Blood Clots Study

Lucine Health Sciences and Hormones Matter are conducting research to investigate the relationship between hormonal birth control and blood clots. If you or a loved one have suffered from a blood clot while using hormonal birth control, please consider participating. We are also looking for participants who have been using hormonal birth control for at least one year and have NOT had a blood clot, as well as women who have NEVER used hormonal birth control. For more information or to participate, click here.

Avoidable Ignorance: Implications for Women’s Health

by Chandler Marrs, PhD

Published on September 7, 2011

4503 views

It is difficult to read the stories of suffering expressed by the women featured in our blog and not become incensed. We can joke about women’s hormone health and deride the science to fringe status, but our failure to recognize, investigate and create options for women has serious consequences. In my mind, this is an avoidable ignorance.

I borrowed that phrase from a quote by Dr. Albert G. Mulley, the new Director of the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science. The full quote “no decision should be made in the face of avoidable ignorance” speaks volumes about the state of women’s health care.

How many women have sought treatment for a dysregulated menstrual cycle, menstrual cycle related pain, or other presumably hormonally modulated events only to be sent home without so much as a lab test but with oral contraceptives? Worse yet, how many women have had an endless array of invasive procedures only to receive an uncertain diagnosis and oral contraceptives. This is avoidable ignorance.

Why don’t women get routine hormone testing for what are presumably hormone related conditions? We wouldn’t treat high blood pressure without first measuring blood pressure or diabetes without first measuring glucose. Why then would we treat presumably hormonal conditions, with hormone modifying drugs, without ever measuring hormones before or during treatment? Is the pill so successful at treating all female symptoms that no testing is ever needed? Or is there some avoidable ignorance at play? Judge for yourself.

The most common arguments against hormone testing include:

1. The clinical reference ranges for hormones are too broad to be useful
2. The test results will not modify clinical decision making, so why test
3. Hormones are too complicated and variable
4. A good clinical interview suffices

It’s not that we cannot develop more robust hormone reference ranges, more sensitive hormone testing methods, perhaps link a woman’s unique biochemistry to her clinical symptoms, we just have not. The often repeated excuse that ‘hormones are complicated, variable and too difficult to analyze’ just doesn’t hold true given the state of science and technology today, neither does the clinical interview argument. A good clinical interview is always important and maybe even a lost art in this era of high tech diagnostics, but wouldn’t it be nice if the average time to diagnose some of these conditions wasn’t 5-10 years?

This brings me back to Dr. Mulley and his discussion on ending avoidable ignorance in healthcare. The responsibility, Dr. Mulley contends, rests with the patient. As a supporter of the e-patient movement, Dr. Mulley believes patients have the responsibility to educate the physicians and other decision-makers about what’s important to them. He says “unless we know what you care about, we have no information to inform investment or disinvestment” in any particular area of health.

In this context, it becomes clear, that maybe as patients, we have failed to own up to some of our responsibilities. Menstrual cycle disorders are uncomfortable to talk about. Who really wants to talk about never ending periods or blood clots—that’s just gross. And pain, one shouldn’t whine about menstrual pain, it’s unbecoming. Then there is the brain fog, fatigue, moodiness— all part of being a woman, or at least that’s what we’re led to believe. What if this isn’t normal? What if we, as women, are relegating our health prospects to ignorance? The Susan G. Komen Foundation did not come to prominence through silence, neither did the Endometriosis Foundation of America or any of the other women’s health organizations.

It is when we begin talking to each other and to our doctors that we can make it clear that these things are important; that the paucity of women’s health options is not acceptable. We need to become experts in our own health, to discern what’s normal and what’s not. We must drive the discourse, guide the research and build understanding for ourselves and our own well-being. We can’t wait for someone else to do this for us. Ignorance can be avoided.

See the full video clip with Dr. Mulley.