How to figure out the right amount of HRT in women

What about checking lab values when you’re on hormone replacement therapy? I do find it to be helpful, but we also want to consider symptoms. So we always look at labs and symptoms combined when we’re doing hormone replacement therapy. We check labs to make sure that numbers don’t get super, super high, and we check to make sure that it’s not super low either, it’s actually doing something.

But there is a wide variety of hormone levels to where women feel good. So some women may feel great on the lower end, maybe their estradiol level’s only 30, 40, 50, versus someone else may be having hot flashes at an estradiol of 30, and they may feel better with an estradiol closer to a hundred. So there’s a broad general range, I think most of us would agree. Most women feel pretty good with an estradiol level somewhere between about 50 and 150, but that can even be adjusted, right? There are some women, as I mentioned, that feel better on the lower end and even lower, maybe even twenties or thirties. And then there’s other women that feel better on the higher end, maybe even closer to 200. It just depends on who you are, and you just have to monitor levels and symptoms.