Bone Loss and Frozen Shoulder in Perimenopause: Why Estrogen Matters

From the video captions, as spoken.

Now, our bones. Estrogen is a huge deal and it's a reason that your skeleton has held up as long as it has. Okay? Now, osteoporosis gets filed away as an older person's disease. And And for many Women, it is actually the consequence of decades of estrogen declining that went unaddressed. You see estrogen restrains the cells that break your bone down. So as estrogen falls, that restraint eases and bone, it like comes apart faster.

It comes apart faster than your body can rebuild it. So Women can lose a meaningful share of their bone density in the years right around Menopause with no symptoms until something breaks. So this is why I recommend you get your DEXA scans. It's a quick, low dose scan of your bone density. It takes minutes, okay? Most Women in this Midlife window are never offered one. Because conventional screening guidance waits to give you a DEXA scan until 65.

And a huge amount of bone loss density has already happened by then. So from a functional medicine approach, you do not wait for the standard screening age. You get a baseline while you are still in the window where you can change your trajectory. All right? So the bone issue, it goes like this. Years of decline starting as early as your 30s and accelerating through Perimenopause. That leads to osteopenia, osteoporosis, and then fractures.

Okay now osteopenia is still reversible. So that's why if you get your earlier scans you can figure out well where am I in this trajectory. This is the very window where strength training Adequate protein, vitamin D, K2, magnesium, and addressing your hormones can actually move your numbers. You can reverse this bone issue. Osteoporosis, very difficult to reverse. You can just slow down the progression. And you know, fractures are what we want to avoid because 1 in 5 people who fracture a hip in older age do not live past that first year.

Okay, as well as many of those who do not get their independence back. So we want our baseline scans You know this whole conversation ultimately is about how we really care for ourselves in Midlife on It is a great determiner How we take care of ourselves in Midlife greatly determines Whether we recognize the faces of the people we love at 75 years old or whether we can get up and down from the toilet by ourselves. Right? So these are the stakes of not taking care of ourselves in Midlife. We're not getting the right help and support and care. It costs us our mind when we're older and it costs us our independence. Now estrogen also connects straight back to inflammation. All right?

Now it shows up in your bones and your blood vessels. Estrogen decline is part of what's behind body aches and joint pain. It has a huge role in joint tissue and inflammatory regulation. And a lot of Women date their first real joint pains to the stretch when their cycles started changing, okay? This is also where some of you may have heard the term frozen shoulder and frozen elbow. This is also where this starts to show up. And many conventional doctors, they don't connect it to your hormones.

A shoulder or an elbow that starts to stiffen for no clear reason or range of motion that quietly disappears and Women are told that it's maybe bursitis or just age. Estrogen decline is a real contributor, all right? So the minute you notice a shoulder or an elbows starting to stiffen, do not wait it out. You want to get it looked at by somebody that understands the relationship between hormones in your joints because a frozen shoulder is far easier to treat early on than when it has fully locked.