Yearly Archives: 2018

It’s the most wonderful time of the year!  Right?  Does all the hustle and bustle of the season leave you feeling worn out, depressed, and stressed?  If you find yourself battling those holiday blues, the answer may be as simply as balancing your hormones.

During the holidays, we tend to consume more sugar and alcohol than usual, which can quickly disrupt our hormonal balance.  Many women experience an increase in mood swings, hot flashes, depression, and insomnia.

To help your hormones stay balanced this time of year, try to go light on caffeinated and alcoholic beverages, and minimize sugary treats.  Caffeine and alcohol raise cortisol levels, which makes it hard for your body to deal with stress and can cause low progesterone.  All of the added sugar in your cookies affects your insulin hormones, which impacts estrogen and can lead to irritability.

Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement Therapy helps replace lost hormones and provide some balance.  It’s a safe and effective way to combat your holiday stress and have make sure this really is The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

Give us a call at 201-225-2525 to schedule your consultation.  Don’t let the holidays wear you down.  Let us help give you back all of your holiday spirit.

Tis the season for Peppermint Cocoa, Pumpkin Pie, Sugar Cookies, and Indulgence! Holiday parties, colder weather, and shorter days make it incredibly difficult to stay committed to a healthy lifestyle… not to mention your ever-growing to-do list this time of year. Staying fit is harder, but doesn’t have to be impossible. We’ve put together some tips to help keep you on track.

BE CREATIVE Opt for exercises that make activity fun and familiar. Explore a new fitness class or take a walk around the neighborhood and look at decorations. Think outside the box and you’ll come up with ways to spend time with family and prioritize your health.
INDULGE FOR A NIGHT But just one night. Avoid binging on all those yummy leftovers. When the party is over, send doggy bags home with as many guests as you can, and then dump the junk!
DRINK WITH MODERATION Don’t discount the all the calories in that eggnog! It’s easy to forget just how often we drink our daily calories, especially when the wine and juice mixers are so plentiful.
SET A CHALLENGE If running in cold weather isn’t your thing, now might be the perfect time to try something new! Try a new bodyweight exercise, take up yoga… whatever you choose, make it fun and set a daily or weekly goal.
ACT LIKE A KID Even if you’re not usually a fan of cold weather, who doesn’t love a good, old-fashioned snow ball fight? Sledding, ice skating, snowshoeing… there are plenty of ways to be active in the cold and still have fun!

If you’re still finding it hard to stay fit and healthy over the holidays, your hormones may be to blame. Give us a call for your personal consultation. We’ll get you ready to start the new year with a new you!

Autumn is upon us, and with that comes Pumpkin Pies, Apple Ciders, Halloween Candy, and Thanksgiving feasts. Staying healthy and active as the weather cools can be a bit more difficult so we’ve gathered some tips to help you stay fit as the days get shorter.
• Walk the Mall. Shopping Malls are a simple (and free!) way to get your steps in and be protected from the elements.
• Join a Health Club. If it’s in the budget, choose one close to home or work so you’re more likely to use it. Try to find a club that has classes or indoor teams like yoga. And if the club has an indoor pool, even better! Swimming is great for building stamina.
• Create a Home Gym. If health clubs aren’t for you, build one! Invest in some practical, easy to use equipment, and toss in some DVDs with instructors to show you some new moves.
• Don’t Forget Your Chores! Vacuuming, shoveling, laundry… they may not be exercises in the traditional sense, but they certainly keep you active and count toward being fit.

Set goals, invest in weather-appropriate gear, and enlist some friends to help keep you accountable! Your body, and your mind, will thank you!

September is a time of year many people think of as a new beginning. It’s the start of a new school year, the time when things tend to settle down after the hustle and bustle of the summer months. Now is the time to rejuvenate and start taking some positive measures with your health. Here are some ideas to help get you started:

1: Don’t Act Your Age! Think about your best year so far, picture yourself at that age, and be it! Positive thinking goes a long way toward positive feeling.
2: Be Positive! Try to see the positive in your conversations and actions every day. Limit complaining, and stop watching all the negative news stories.
3: Drop Your Negative Friends. Surround yourself with people who have a positive outlook. Energetic, happy, positive people will help you be happy, too! Smile! People who smile more often are happier.
4: Walk the Walk. Do you walk slowly because you’ve become lazy? Make an effort to take big strides, walk heel first, and wear comfortable shoes.
5: Stand Up Straight! Look at yourself in the mirror. Hold your stomach in, shoulders back, chin up. Fix your stance and practice every day. You’ll look great and feel better!
6: Check Those Pearly Whites. Teeth are often the first thing people notice. Good oral health is just as important as good physical health. Go to the dentist regularly.
7: Find Your Artist. Take music classes, learn to paint, try woodworking! Creativity keeps our brains young!
8: Check Your Hormones! Aging doesn’t have to mean feeling less than you did when you were younger.

Call us today at 201-225-2525 to schedule your consultation so we can make sure you continue to age healthily.

July and August tend to be the hottest months of year, and pairing summer heat with hot flashes is a recipe for disaster! Hot flashes are caused by drops and spikes in estrogen levels as we age. We’ve compiled a list of some ways you can try to combat your hot flashes and make it through the summer:

Pay Attention to Triggers. Do you notice more intense flashes after spicy foods? Caffeine? Stress? All of these things can cause our blood vessels to dilate, making hot flashes even worse. Try to track your flashes to see if you can pinpoint problematic behaviors.

Stay Near the Air Conditioning. Well of course! And if you don’t have AC, an oscillating fan works wonders as well.

Dress in Layers. Give yourself the option of peeling off those outer layers when you have to stay cool.

Try Controlled Breathing. Taking slow, deep breaths when a flash starts can help decrease severity. Paced respiration helps slow our heart rate and open up those blood vessels.

Avoid Harsh Chemicals. Sunscreen includes synthetic estrogens such as oxybenzone and avobenzone which penetrates the skin and further disrupts our hormone system. Look for zinc oxide and titanium oxide instead.

Try Acupuncture. Acupuncture increases production of endorphins, which may help stabilixe our body temperature.

Exercise. Exercise has been shows to improve hot flashes in some women, provided you finish up more than 3 hours before bedtime.

Hormone Testing. Of course, give us a call at 201-255-2525 for a consultation to pinpoint your exact imbalance so we can create a customized plan to help get you feeling comfortable and enjoying the rest of the summer!

With the warmer months here, you may be thinking about weight loss.  In addition to proper diet and exercise, hormones play a vital role in our body weight and composition.  When we are experiencing a hormone imbalance, we can also experience weight gain due to lowered energy levels and increased fatty deposits.  On the flip side of this, overweight individuals may experience hormone fluctuations related to a metabolic syndrome.

Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy (BHRT) can help both men and women manage their weight.  Testosterone is associated with higher energy levels and helping the body convert food into energy and lean muscle mass.  Estrogen enables the leptin in our bodies to help us feel full so we eat less and increase our metabolism.

When we have low testosterone levels, we tend to become more sedentary, and more of our food becomes fatty deposits rather than lean muscle.  During perimenopause and menopause, women who use BHRT typically experience fewer problems with weight gain and the distribution of fat.

BHRT pellets can help individuals with hormone imbalances lose weight by replenishing hormones with those that are naturally occurring.  Pellet therapy can release hormones within the body throughout the day as needed.

Contact us today at 201-225-2525 to schedule your free consultation.  Let’s get you feeling your best for the summer!

June is National Men’s Health Month. Let’s take this opportunity to encourage men to pay attention to their health and make some healthy choices.

Here are 4 simple ways to be healthier in June:

1. Change your Red Meat habit. You don’t have to completely cut out all the steaks at your summer BBQs, but you should be trying to reduce the amount of saturated fats in your cuts and in your burgers.

2. Get More (and better) Sleep. Not getting enough sleep can increase your risk for heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and depression.

3. Be More Active. Take the stairs, do yardwork, go for a summer evening stroll. There are endless ways to make simple but effective choices to stay active.

4. Stop Smoking! Quitting can immediately lower your risk for heart disease, cancer, and lung disease.

Of course, prevention goes a long way to staying healthy. So many health conditions can be prevented with regular screenings and check-ups. Men make half as many visits to their doctor for prevention as women do.

It’s time for men to take a proactive approach to their health. Wear Blue on Friday, June 15th to help raise awareness about the importance of men’s health and to encourage men to live longer and healthier lives.

By Lisa Mosconi-Dr. Mosconi is a neuroscientist.
April 18, 2018

In the next three minutes, three people will develop Alzheimer’s disease. Two of them will be women.
There are 5.7 million Alzheimer’s patients in the United States. By 2050, there will probably be as many as 14 million, and twice as many women as men will have the disease.

And yet research into “women’s health” remains largely focused on reproductive fitness and breast cancer. We need to be paying much more attention to the most important aspect of any woman’s future: her ability to think, to recall, to imagine — her brain.

When I first started in the field, Alzheimer’s was thought of as the inevitable consequence of bad genes, aging or both. Today we understand that Alzheimer’s has compound causes, such as age, genetics, high blood pressure and aspects of lifestyle, including diet and exercise. There is also scientific consensus that Alzheimer’s is not always a disease of old age but can start in the brain when people are in their 40s and 50s.

What we are only beginning to understand is why women are more susceptible. What factors differentiate women from men, specifically as we reach middle age?

The first and most obvious thing is fertility. Women are diverse, but we all experience the decline in fertility and the beginning of menopause.

It turns out that menopause affects far more than our childbearing potential. Symptoms like night sweats, hot flashes and depression originate not in the ovaries but largely in the brain. These symptoms are all caused by an ebb in estrogen. The latest research, including my own work, indicates that estrogen serves to protect the female brain from aging. It stimulates neural activity and may help prevent the build up of plaques that are connected to the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. When estrogen levels decline, the female brain becomes much more vulnerable.

To determine this, my colleagues and I used a brain imaging technique called PET on a group of healthy middle-aged women. This allowed us to measure neural activity and the presence of Alzheimer’s plaques. The tests revealed that the women who were postmenopausal had less brain activity and more Alzheimer’s plaques than premenopausal women. More surprising, this was also the case for perimenopausal women — those who were just starting to experience symptoms of menopause. And both groups’ brains showed even more drastic differences when compared with those of healthy men of the same age.

The good news is that as women mature into their 40s and 50s, there seems to be a window of opportunity when it is possible to detect early signs of higher Alzheimer’s risk — by doing a brain-imaging test, as we did — and to take action to reduce that risk.

There is increasing evidence that hormone replacement therapies — mainly, giving women supplemental estrogen — can help to alleviate symptoms if given before menopause. We need much more research to test the efficacy and safety of hormone therapy, which has been tied to an increased risk of heart disease, blood clots and breast cancer in some cases.

Perhaps in the next decade it will become the norm for middle-aged women to receive preventive testing and treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, just as they get mammograms today. In the meantime, research shows that diet can alleviate and mitigate the effects of menopause in women which could minimize the risk of Alzheimer’s.

Many foods naturally boost estrogen production, including soy, flax seeds, chickpeas, garlic and fruit like apricots. Women in particular also need antioxidant nutrients like vitamin C and vitamin E, found in berries, citrus fruits, almonds, raw cacao, Brazil nuts and many leafy green vegetables.

These are first steps, for women and for doctors. But the more we learn about what kicks off and accelerates dementia, the clearer it becomes that we need to take better care of women’s brains. A comprehensive evaluation of women’s health demands thorough investigations of the aging brain, the function of estrogen in protecting it and strategies to prevent Alzheimer’s in women specifically.
No one needs to be reminded that many things make a woman unique. We are working to help make sure that the risk of Alzheimer’s is not one of them.

Lisa Mosconi is the associate director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College and the author of “Brain Food: The Surprising Science of Eating for Cognitive Power.”

May 13th marks the beginning of Women’s Health Week, with a goal to empower women to make their health a priority. So often women put their own needs and issues aside to care for others, and this week serves as a reminder to encourage women to take steps to improve their own health. What are you going to do to take care of yourself today? This week? This month?
First, take a moment to just stop, breathe, and relax. Take time to smell the roses. Now, take time this week to visit your doctor for a checkup and any preventative screenings it may be time for. Get active, eat healthy, and don’t forget about your mental health, too! Get ample sleep and manage your stress. Avoid smoking, don’t text while driving, and always wear your seatbelt or bicycle helmet.

At Advanced Hormone Solutions, we can help you manage they symptoms of several conditions including menopause, perimenopause, and weight-loss resistance. It is time for all women to understand their options when it comes to seizing control of their quality of life. For more information, read our article “The Long and Misunderstood History of Hormone Replacement Therapy on our website at www.AdvancedHormoneSolutions.com/press-releases.

Take this month to focus on you! Call us today at 201-225-2525 to schedule your free consultation and get back to feeling like your best you!

April is Parkinson’s Awareness Month. Parkinson’s Disease is estimated to afflict seven to ten million people worldwide, and approximately one million people in the U.S. Parkinson’s is a chronic and progressive movement disorder which occurs when part of the brain deteriorates due to dopamine deficiency. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that impacts movement, emotional response, and the ability to feel pleasure. The severity of Parkinson’s differs from person to person and there is no current cure, but researchers are hopeful.

Many early-onset Parkinson’s patients have seen benefits from Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy.  Testosterone pellets have been found to decrease inflammation in the brain which enables men and women with Parkinson’s Disease to exercise. Estradiol pellets can help restore dopamine production, which results in increased functionality and a slowed progression of the disease. Patients have also reported experiencing more mobility, diminished depression, and even a reduction in medications.  BHRT has shown to help patients stay motivated to exercise more, which in itself increases the vitality and energy needed to keep active.

A study published in the Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine in 2007 suggests that exercise may slow the progression of the disease. Regular exercise may also reduce anxiety, increase confidence, offer more social interaction, and provide a distraction, which makes sense as exercise increases blood calcium levels which are known to increase dopamine production in the brain.

For more information on how BHRT can help alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease, or how we can help with several other issues, give us a call at 201-225-2525 to schedule your consultation.  We look forward to getting you back on track.