How To Maintain a Steady Estradiol Level

Dr. Phillip Sarrel shares how a woman can maintain a steady estradiol level.

Estradiol, which is the key estrogen, remember that the ovaries we’re making all of her life, can now be made in a factory. It’s extracted from yams, and it’s extracted from soy, so in fact you can make the hormone exactly that a woman’s body has been accustomed to all of her life. Now, she can receive it; she can take it in a variety of forms, as a pill or as a non-oral preparation. There’s a vaginal cream with estradiol, there’s a skin patch with estradiol, there’s a gel with estradiol, there’s a spray with estradiol. In our experience at Yale, our best success in trying to achieve a steady state in the delivery of estradiol has been with estradiol skin patches, and as the patches have improved, what we have seen that works best right now is not a generic patch. They don’t work very well at all, but an FDA-approved patch that’s changed twice a week, which has a wide range of dose levels. So in fact, you can tailor it to the woman’s needs.