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Hi Wren
Glad you've got some helpful answers, and good luck.
Please let me know if you manage to get a hormone test through your GP, and what you said to him/her, etc, as if you're successful I might go see my GP too.
Many thanks
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Hello. I know this thread is old but I think I know why your breasts were shrinking. You said you are underweight but has full breasts right? Maybe it's because of an hormonal imbalance, maybe you have too much estrogen. EPO balances hormones among doing other things.
I also read that it decreases prolactin. Maybe this was your problem.
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Thanks for your input Blue Colleen
Yes, I'm bordering on underweight (by BMI standards which we all know is a bit iffy) but have been most of my life. I have seen a dietician who told me I'm perfectly healthy diet-wise, and that it's just my body type (my dad is slim, always has been). I do know I sometimes don't fit in all the extra calories I should, and that's something I must do all the time.
I do think I need to balance out my hormones, so I started taking vitex instead maybe a month or so ago. I know this takes time to balance things out, but so far it hasn't had a negative effect on my breasts the way EPO did. I know I shouldn't have, but I did try a week or two of fenugreek (tea, from seeds) just to see what it did, and I had noticeable growth. It was just an experiment and now I'll leave off everything except the vitex until my hormones are balanced.
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Vitex (chasteberry) lowers prolactin. Lower prolactin helps boost estrogen, and lowers progesterone. Though like its name, chasteberry lowers drive, implying it may lower another hormone.
Chasteberry, and evening primrose oil might be good, but not during the luteal phase.
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(26-06-2014, 16:36)lovely11 Wrote: Vitex (chasteberry) lowers prolactin. Lower prolactin helps boost estrogen, and lowers progesterone. Though like its name, chasteberry lowers drive, implying it may lower another hormone.
Chasteberry, and evening primrose oil might be good, but not during the luteal phase.
It actually increases progesterone
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23136064
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What you said makes a whole lot more sense. It makes more sense for it to raise progesterone, than it lowering an androgen. I thought there was some anomaly with vitex, like this. In the abstract, it says vitex lowers prolactin (when there are excesses [hyperprolactinaemia]), and raises progesterone during the mid luteal phase. It also says it raises 17β-oestradiol. I still have to look through the rest of the paper.
We never went in to studying what each estrogen does. That might be something. Estrogens are a class of hormones, and we were always told estrogen is THE hormone.
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(26-06-2014, 17:11)Lotus Wrote: It actually increases progesterone
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23136064
That's a good find by the way. It's a 'review', which looks at a lot of studies, and has a lot of information concentrated in one place. It looks into the information then interprets and compares studies for scientific application or relevancy. A review that is also open access also gives us information about studies that are behind paywalls.
