Hormone therapy

If you have health insurance, call them to find out what your benefits are with hormone therapy. They can give you an estimate of your out-of-pocket expenses and copays (the amount you pay for each prescription or service). You can also talk with the finance or billing department of your health provider’s office or treatment center. • Oral: Pills or liquids you swallow • Intravenous (IV): Goes directly into a vein through a line • Injection: Given into a muscle or under the skin • Intrathecal: Injected into the space between the tissue layers covering the brain and spinal cord • Intraperitoneal (IP): Placed right into the peritoneal cavity, the area that holds your intestines, stomach, and liver • Intra-arterial (IA): Injected into the artery leading to the cancer • Topical: Preparations you apply to the skin • Fatigue (due to anemia—low numbers of healthy red blood cells) • Hair loss • Nausea and vomiting • Changes in bowel habits (diarrhea, constipation) • Mouth/tongue/throat issues (sores, difficulty swallowing) • Peripheral neuropathy (nerve damage) • Appetite changes • Easy bruising (due to destruction of platelet cells that assist in blood clotting) • Fluctuations in weight • Chemo brain (mental cloudiness) • Changes in libido and fertility • Increased risk of infection Can Hormone Therapy and Chemotherapy Be Used Together? Yes, they can be used together for certain cancers for certain people. It also depends on your menopausal status, overall health, and age. Someti...

Hormone therapy is a type of cancer treatment that removes, blocks, or adds a specific hormone to stop or slow the growth of cancer cells. It is also called hormonal therapy, anti-hormonal therapy, or endocrine therapy. Like other cancer treatments, hormone therapy can cause side effects. Side effects can be different for each person. The side effects of this treatment can depend on many factors, including: • Type of hormone therapy • How much medication you receive, called a dose • How your body absorbs the medication Your health care team can help you manage side effects. This is called palliative and supportive care. It helps people with any stage of cancer feel better. Before hormone therapy begins, talk with your doctor about the possible side effects of your specific treatment plan and how they may be relieved or managed. This article is about the common side effects of hormone therapy for cancer treatment. Learn more about the Why does hormone therapy cause side effects? Hormones are chemicals created in the body that control the activity of certain cells or organs. They move through the bloodstream. Changes to the amount of a hormone in your body can affect what that hormone controls and can cause specific side effects. Some hormones affect body functions, so hormone therapy can cause many different side effects. Managing the side effects of hormone therapy Before hormone therapy begins, talk with your doctor about what side effects could happen and how they can be...

Medications such as antidepressants and anti-seizure drugs also might help reduce hot flashes, although they're less effective than hormones. Discuss the pros and cons of various treatments with your doctor. If hot flashes don't interfere with your life, you probably don't need treatment. Hot flashes subside gradually for most women, even without treatment, but it can take several years for them to stop. Hormone therapy Estrogen is the primary hormone used to reduce hot flashes. Most women who have had a hysterectomy can take estrogen alone. But if you still have a uterus, you should take progesterone with estrogen to protect against cancer of the lining of the uterus (endometrial cancer). With either regimen, the therapy needs to be tailored to your needs. Guidelines suggest using the smallest effective dose for symptom control. How long you use the treatment depends on the balance of your risks and benefits from hormone therapy. The goal is to optimize your quality of life. Some women who take progesterone with estrogen therapy experience progesterone-related side effects. For women who can't tolerate oral progesterone, a combination drug of bazedoxifene with conjugated estrogens (Duavee) is also approved for treating menopausal symptoms. Like progesterone, taking bazedoxifene with estrogen may help you avoid the increased risk of endometrial cancer from estrogen alone. Bazedoxifene might also protect your bones. If you have had or are at risk of breast or endometrial ca...

• Shuster, Lynne T.; Rhodes, Deborah J.; Gostout, Bobbie S.; Grossardt, Brandon R.; Rocca, Walter A. (2010). 65 (2): 161–166. • Kang, DY; Li, HJ (January 2015). Medicine. 94 (3): e410. • Giwercman, A; Lundberg Giwercman, Y (2015). Hormones. 14 (4): 590–7. • Staff (3 March 2015). . Retrieved 5 March 2015. . NEJM Perspective piece: Nguyen, CP; etal. (20 August 2015). The New England Journal of Medicine. 373 (8): 689–91. . Popular summary: Tavernise, Sabrina (March 3, 2015). . Retrieved March 19, 2015. • Testosterone derivatives: • • • • • • • • • • • # • • Dihydrotestosterone derivatives: • • • • • • • • • • 19-Nortestosterone derivatives: • • • • • • • 17α-Alkylated testosterone derivatives: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 17α-Alkylated dihydrotestosterone derivatives: • • • • • • • 17α-Alkylated 19-nortestosterone derivatives: • • • • • 17α-Vinyltestosterone derivatives: • 17α-Ethynyltestosterone derivatives: • • • • Progesterone derivatives: • Progesterone derivatives: • • Retroprogesterone derivatives: • • 17α-Hydroxyprogesterone (and closely related) derivatives: 17α-Hydroxylated: • • • • • • • • • • • • # • • • • • • 17α-Methylated: Others: • 19-Norprogesterone derivatives: 17α-Hydroxylated: • • • 17α-Methylated: • • • Testosterone derivatives: Estranes: • • • 19-Nortestosterone derivatives: Estranes: • • • • • # • • • • • • • • • • Gonanes: • • • • # • • • • Spirolactone derivatives: • Others:

Overview Feminizing hormone therapy typically is used by transgender women and nonbinary people to produce physical changes in the body that are caused by female hormones during puberty. Those changes are called secondary sex characteristics. This hormone therapy helps better align the body with a person's gender identity. Feminizing hormone therapy also is called gender-affirming hormone therapy. Feminizing hormone therapy involves taking medicine to block the action of the hormone testosterone. It also includes taking the hormone estrogen. Estrogen lowers the amount of testosterone the body makes. It also triggers the development of feminine secondary sex characteristics. Feminizing hormone therapy can be done alone or along with feminizing surgery. Not everybody chooses to have feminizing hormone therapy. It can affect fertility and sexual function, and it might lead to health problems. Talk with your health care provider about the risks and benefits for you. Why it's done Feminizing hormone therapy is used to change the body's hormone levels. Those hormone changes trigger physical changes that help better align the body with a person's gender identity. In some cases, people seeking feminizing hormone therapy experience discomfort or distress because their gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth or from their sex-related physical characteristics. This condition is called gender dysphoria. Feminizing hormone therapy can: • Improve psychological and socia...

If you’re looking for relief from What Is Hormone Replacement Therapy? During menopause, your estrogen levels fall. Some women get uncomfortable symptoms known as vasomotor symptoms like Estrogen Therapy Estrogen Therapy: If a woman is having symptoms of menopause after a • Estrogen pill. Pills are the • Estrogen patch. The patch is worn on the skin of your abdomen. Depending on the dose, some patches are replaced every few days, while others can be worn for a week. Examples are • Topical estrogen. Creams, gels, and sprays offer other ways of getting estrogen into your system. Examples include gels (like • Vaginal estrogen. Vaginal estrogen comes in a cream, vaginal ring, or vaginal estrogen tablets. In general, these treatments are for women who are troubled specifically by Estrogen/Progesterone/Progestin Hormone Therapy This is often called combination therapy, since it combines doses of estrogen and progestin, the synthetic form of progesterone. It’s meant for women who still have their uterus. Taking estrogen with While generally used as a form of birth control, progesterone can help treat menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes. • Oral progestins. Taken in pill form, progestin medications include • Intrauterine progestin. Low-dose intrauterine devices (IUD) with What Are the Benefits of Hormone Replacement Therapy? HRT may: • Relieve • Help you • Ease • Make sex less painful • Help prevent • Make some women less likely to have • Lower your chances of What Are the Risk...

How hormone therapy is used to treat cancer Hormones are proteins or substances made by the body that help to control how certain types of cells work. For example, some parts of the body rely on sex hormones, such as estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone, to function properly. There are other types of hormones in our bodies, too, such as thyroid hormones, cortisol, adrenaline, and insulin. Different types of hormones are made by different organs or glands. Some cancers depend on hormones to grow. Because of this, treatments that block or alter hormones can sometimes help slow or stop the growth of these cancers. Treating cancer with hormones is called hormone therapy, hormonal therapy, or endocrine therapy. Hormone therapy is mostly used to treat certain kinds of breast cancer and prostate cancer that depend on sex hormones to grow. A few other cancers can be treated with hormone therapy, too. Hormone therapy is considered a systemictreatment because the hormones they target circulate in the body. The drugs used in hormone therapy travel throughout the body to target and find the hormones. This makes it different from treatments that affect only a certain part of body, like most types of surgery and radiation therapy. Treatments like these are called localtreatments because they affect one part of the body. (However, surgery to remove hormone-making organs can also be used as a form of hormone therapy, as discussed below.) The information below describes hormone therapy...

Prostate cancer Prostate cancer occurs in the prostate gland. The gland sits just below the bladder in males. It surrounds the top part of the tube that drains urine from the bladder, called the urethra. This illustration shows a healthy prostate gland and a prostate gland with cancer. Hormone therapy for prostate cancer is a treatment that stops the hormone testosterone either from being made or from reaching prostate cancer cells. Most prostate cancer cells rely on testosterone to grow. Hormone therapy causes prostate cancer cells to die or to grow more slowly. Why it's done Hormone therapy for prostate cancer is used to block the hormone testosterone in the body. Testosterone fuels the growth of prostate cancer cells. Hormone therapy might be a choice for prostate cancer at different times and for different reasons during cancer treatment. Hormone therapy can be used: • For prostate cancer that has spread, called metastatic prostate cancer, to shrink the cancer and slow the growth of tumors. The treatment also might relieve symptoms. • After prostate cancer treatment if the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level remains high or starts rising. • In locally advanced prostate cancer, to make external beam radiation therapy better at lowering the risk of the cancer coming back. • To lower the risk that the cancer will come back in those who have a high risk of cancer recurrence. Risks Side effects of hormone therapy for prostate cancer can include: • Loss of muscle mass. • I...