How hormone testing can help you treat your condition, and provide a better path forward to healthy aging with scoliosis.
When were you or your child first diagnosed with scoliosis? During the “tween” or teen years? Later in life, as you were experiencing additional changes associated with aging? If you’ve answered yes to either of these questions (or both) it’s not surprising. Research shows that hormone changes directly affect scoliosis.
In a recent blog post, Dr. Mark Morningstar writes about how hormones can affect curve progression. He also presents a well-known fact, that, “…scoliosis occurs in 2-3% of children during puberty. The incidence increases over 400% in females age 50 and up, which coincides with the hormonal changes associated with menopause.” Clearly, the swirling, ever-changing hormones can wreak havoc on the body, and if your DNA has a predisposition to scoliosis, chances are high that you’ll develop scoliosis. Add to that the other hormone changes you might experience. For girls, extreme mood changes, the start of menstruation, and noticeable growth spurts highlight the tween and teen years. Mood changes, night sweats, and loss of libido plague older women of a certain age.
It’s a challenging time for women and girls
Is there anything you can do to change your scoliosis diagnosis? Not yet. But there is a way to manage how aging with scoliosis is affected by the natural changes in hormones. You can test, moderate and effectively manage your hormones.
When you treat the whole scoliosis condition, and not just the curve and curve progression, you can change the impact scoliosis has on your life.
Hormones affect the process of aging with scoliosis
It’s been said that the only things permanent in life are death, taxes, and scoliosis. And while that’s true, it doesn’t mean you have to “just get through it.” There are ways to appropriately test, moderate and effectively monitor the hormone levels in your body that affect your specific scoliosis condition.
While many hormones regulate, benefit and positively affect the body, there are two that are essential for females aging with scoliosis. Estrogen and progesterone are an important part of a woman’s emotional, mental, and physical health through every stage of life. While estrogen contributes to a number of important growth developments within a woman’s body, it is also a bone growth signaling hormone.
Studies have shown that abnormal estrogen utilization during growth is considered an initiating factor in adolescent idiopathic scoliosis. Different parts of the spine grow or lengthen at different speeds. Does anyone have a daughter with extremely sore legs/knees during their growth spurt? It’s because bones are growing at a different pace while muscles, tendons, and the rest of the body try to keep up.
For girls with a predisposition to scoliosis, their bodies adapt to this uneven growth in the spine, therefore directly affecting the spine’s curve. For older women, the well-documented risk of developing osteoporosis during the natural decline in estrogen levels supports this. If you have scoliosis and have experienced menopause, you may have noticed the loss of bone density has caused your curve to increase.
Are you familiar with your current hormone levels, and which hormones are potentially lacking within your body? Could this possibly be the reason that your scoliosis has been “acting up” or causing additional pain?
Testing is essential
Since aging – both into the teen years and beyond – is a normal process of life, all people, especially women, can expect hormone changes. When you have scoliosis, hormone testing becomes critical; not only to measure the “normal” hormone levels that change within your body, but which hormones may/may not affect your scoliosis.
Using a saliva-based hormone testing kit, done from the comfort of your home, is an accurate and convenient way to effectively manage your hormone levels safely and inexpensively. Having this information available will provide direction on how to properly manage your changing hormones, as well as the potential change in your scoliosis curvature. With help from the doctors at ScoliSMART, you can develop a plan for safe, effective, and inexpensive non-drug therapies based on your test results.
Moderation and management are key.
Hormone management is an extremely important strategy for reducing the symptoms related to hormone changes, maintaining proper bone health, and especially, preventing age-related curve progression. Hormone imbalance is related to a wide variety of symptoms, whether you have scoliosis or not. Weight gain, fatigue, digestive problems, and insomnia are just a few.
As mentioned above, an important hormone associated with healthy aging with scoliosis and the potential changes it has on your body is estrogen. Decreasing bone density and mass (amount of bone) and age-related scoliosis curve progression are directly linked to estrogen levels. As bone density and bone strength decrease, it’s harder for your body to prevent an increase in your spine curvature.
However, when you accurately assess and manage the number of specific hormones within your body, you can appropriately supplement hormones to counteract changes, including the loss of bone density. Safe, effective, and inexpensive non-drug nutrient therapies are available based on your testing results. For example, if bone density is an issue for you, adding nutritional supplements to increase bone density will prevent an increase in spine curvature.
Understanding and then appropriately managing hormone test results can be overwhelming. With the help of ScoliSMART experts, once you receive results from your hormone test, they will work with you to determine your best course of action, based on your own or your child’s personal needs. Certain hormones may need a boost; other hormones may need to be better managed. Additional non-invasive scoliosis treatment can also prevent an increase in spine curvature, pain, or other scoliosis-related problems associated with normal hormone variations.
Information on aging with scoliosis supports the journey
Scoliosis is a lifelong journey. Hormone changes and potential imbalances are part of that journey. When you partner with the experts at ScoliSMART, you receive targeted solutions that treat the whole scoliosis condition, and not just the curve.
