Thursday, April 8, 2021

just to close the thought on that, if you google the terms you'll see people try to build a correlation between estrogen decreases in menopause and ferritin increases about the same time.

while it is obvious that iron stores should increase once the post-menopausal woman stops bleeding, there's no causal relationship or known mechanism tying these things together (besides the obvious trigger mechanism). that is, ignoring the triggering process, the increase in iron doesn't seem to have anything to do with the decrease in estrogen (nor do low iron stores seem to have much to do with high estrogen levels). that's an example of an easily intuited and absolutely valid correlation, without any concept of causality underlying it.

rather, the link i posted discussed the actual chemistry, the actual mechanism, how it actually works, and what their conclusion is is actually the opposite of that - because women that produce estrogen also menstruate, high estrogen levels are both associated with increases in bleeding and with increases in iron absorption. so, if you take away the bleeding, what's left is the absorption.

of course, i might be bleeding somewhere else, after all....in which case, the fact that my blood work actually looks a whole lot like i'me menstruating would be borne out in parallel.

on top of that, if it's genetic, as i suspect it is at this point, then it probably has to do with the same hormone.  estrogen suppresses this hormone, which causes increases in absorption; if i'm overproducing it due to genetics, it could be the cause of the problem.

....in which case, i need to find a way to suppress it more, and that could very well be by taking more estrogen.