Just something that occurred to me when thinking about my elderly cat, who’s spent almost 16 years without her uterus or ovaries to no apparent detriment.
In: Biology
HRT for humans after losing their gonads is also really sucky. It doesn’t actually fix half the problems losing your gonads causes and causes a whole plethora of new problems that are potentially life ending. Animals that we tend to neuter, with their typically drastically shorter life span, don’t really suffer from the side effects as much. In part due to that one of the major side effects of loss of your gonads is early onset dementia.
An old dog is about the same as a puppy, cognitively, just a little more experienced and maybe a little more tired that mellows them. A fully adult human is drastically more advanced than even a legal adult human. Your frontal lobes continue to develop well into your 20’s. You know how forgetful, absentminded, and slow your grandparents seem? It’s not all just getting old… it’s also a significant decrease in the production of sex hormones. The biggest “benefits” of gonad removal are prior to the onset of puberty in animals because it practically eliminates the risk of sex based cancers like breast cancer. But humans don’t finish developing at puberty… we continue to develop major parts of our anatomy and brains for another 10 years at least!
The average age for menopause, when hormone production decreases drastically in women, is 52. And there are active adults at 90 (The previous Queen of England, Maggie Smith (honorable mention), my grandma). White brain tissue mass decreases, bone mass decreases, your immune system becomes weaker. HRT mitigates some of these but they don’t typically provide HRT just for menopause. Any doctor worth their salt won’t want to provide HRT just due to old age because of the risk of developing cancers in the tissues that use the specific hormone the most. Breast and uterine tissue in women, for example. They prefer to provide topical ointments, creams, or blood pressure medication (viagra, lol) to resolve the minor discomforts the lessening levels cause.
So humans regularly go for 30-50 years with steadily slowing hormone production. Few pets live anywhere near that long. The primary reasons for HRT in humans is improved sexual function and a reduction in uncomfortable symptoms like hot flashes. Humans who actually get their gonads removed… HRT does not really fix that. It might help with the same minor things as the reduced production in elderly humans deal with… but it does not really replace the lost function of the gonads. And the trade-off being cancer makes it really a tough sell unless you find one of those money grubbing unscrupulous doctors who wants to prescribe based on feelings instead of science.
I’m going to start HRT in the next year and part of my health plan involves the removal of all the tissues that would be at increased risk for becoming cancerous due to the HRT. It is no panacea and I would not do it if being dead by 50 were not my alternative.
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