Leading Women's Health Doc from HER Place Launches 'Straight Truth about Hormones Campaign'.

TUCSON, Ariz. -- One of the nation's pioneering women's health physicians has embarked on a nationwide "Straight Truth About Hormones Campaign," pledging to undo misinformation about hormone therapy that has plagued American women for decades.

Noting that a recent French study and a newly updated U.S. government study confirm what she has been saying publicly for many years, Elizabeth Lee Vliet M.D. said she would begin a series of informational appearances in cities across America to educate women about overall hormone health. Times and locations will be announced later.

"Even the recent hormone headlines don't get it straight, and it's time that the women in America have access to information just as European women have had for more than 30 years," said Vliet, winner of the Arizona Foundation for Women's Voice of Women award for 2007 and founder of HER Place (www.herplace.com), a medical practice in Dallas and Tucson devoted to women's health. "We're in the most progressive country in the world, yet American women are stuck in the 1960s when it comes to information about hormones. I intend to change that."

As part of the campaign, Vliet has created a nonprofit foundation, Straight Truth About Hormones[TM] Inc., to educate women on hormone use.

Vliet has taken action because of an April 3 announcement from the National Institutes of Health reversing some of the more alarming findings in its 2002 Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study. Vliet has contended all along that the WHI study was seriously flawed.

Another recent study, known as ESTHER (short for Estrogen and Thromboembolism Risk), supports Vliet's views. Funded primarily by French government health agencies, ESTHER found that gels and patches are safer than pills for women undergoing hormone therapy. Method of delivery is just one of several hormone issues on which Americans have been misinformed, said Vliet, who also espouses the use of FDA-approved bioidentical hormones over more commonly used, horse-derived estrogens that were used in WHI.

"In the United States, the ESTHER study comes as a surprise to women and most doctors," said Vliet, who prescribes gels, patches and other transdermal hormones for most of her patients suffering from the symptoms of menopause. "But European women and their doctors have known about the differences in hormones for over 30 years, and I've been writing about them since the early 1990s."

ESTHER showed that women using estradiol gel or patches had no more blood clots than women using no hormones at all (placebo). Women taking oral estrogens were four times more likely to have a blood clot than women using estrogen in a transdermal (through the skin) delivery.

Vliet has been a forceful speaker on the lecture circuit for years and has authored six consumer books about hormone health, beginning with Screaming to Be Heard: Hormone Connections Women Suspect And Doctors Ignore in 1995 (revised in 2001), The Savvy Woman's Guide to Testosterone (2005) and It's My Ovaries, Stupid! (2007). Her newest books are The Savvy Woman's Guide to Hormone Headlines and The Savvy Woman's Guide to Estrogen.

An estimated 4 million menopausal women use hormones to relieve hot flashes, mood swings, diminished sex drive, depression, osteoporosis and other symptoms. Of American women taking prescription hormones over the last 50 years, 80 to 85 percent are given oral Premarin pills (a mixture of horse estrogens) or Prempro (horse estrogens plus a potent synthetic progestin). "These products contain hormones that are quite different from the ones that women produce naturally," Vliet said.

European women, on the other hand, have traditionally used products that contain bioidentical estradiol and progesterone, hormones that are molecular copies of what the human body makes. Eighty percent of women in France and Italy use transdermal forms of estradiol such as gels, lotions or patches that have been approved by their regulatory bodies (similar to the FDA in this country).

EstroGel, for example, was approved in France in 1974 and has been the most widely used form of estradiol in Europe for three decades. When did American women have access to this? Not until 30 years later, when the FDA approved it in 2004. "So it seems the French have handled women's hormone therapy a lot better than the Americans for a long, long time," Vliet said.

"How the hormones are delivered can be a critical factor in risk," Vliet said. Only about 10 percent of American women use transdermal estradiol. "This despite the fact British researchers first published studies in the 1970s showing reduced risk of blood clots with non-oral estrogen," Vliet said. She said she prescribes the transdermal route for up to 80 percent of her patients who need hormones. EstroGel, Estrasorb, Climara and Vivelle DOT are among the transdermal options approved by the FDA in the United States.

The primary difference between oral and transdermal delivery is that oral estrogens must first be metabolized, or changed, in the liver, Vliet said. This "first pass" through the liver stimulates production of clotting factors and proteins that lead to both negative effects (including possible blood clots) and positive effects (such as an increase in HDL, or "good" cholesterol). More information is available at www.herplace.com.