/assets/images/provider/photos/2499165.jpg)
The roles that reproductive hormones play in your sex life are both direct and indirect and often only felt when they’re out of balance. Here’s how these hormones influence your sex life and what we can do to help.
Your reproductive hormones influence your overall health and wellness in many ways — ways often only discovered when these hormones are out of balance.
When it comes to your sex life, these hormones play no small role and a drop can lead to side effects like lower libido and declining vaginal health.
At Life Point Medical, Dr. Timothy Scott Beck and our team, which includes The Women’s Center, specialize in hormonal health in men and women. We understand the wide net that reproductive hormones can cast.
If your sex life isn’t what it used to be and you’re trying to figure out why, read on to explore whether a hormonal imbalance may be a factor.
Ladies first
Women are no strangers to fluctuating levels in their reproductive hormones, as estrogen and progesterone rise and fall throughout their reproductive years.
From monthly menstrual cycles to pregnancy, women are more familiar with the roller coaster ride that comes with reproductive hormone levels.
When women pass through menopause, however, they experience a precipitous drop in their reproductive hormone levels. This can cause a number of side effects that impact their sex lives.
To start, more than half of women who go through menopause experience vaginal dryness, which can make intercourse quite uncomfortable. As well, vaginal tissues can become thinner and the vaginal canal can shorten, which might also render sex less than pleasing.
While these vaginal changes can certainly impact a woman’s sex life, lower hormone levels can also lead to lower libido.
Over to the men
Men don’t experience the same, sudden drop in reproductive hormone levels as women, but their testosterone levels do fall over time — about 1% a year starting at age 30. This decline is barely noticeable at first, but the deficit adds up as the years go by.
Outside of aging, men can experience hypogonadism (low production of sex hormones) for other reasons, such as injury to the testicles, an infection, cancer treatments, and certain autoimmune disorders.
If the levels of testosterone dip low enough, it can lead to a corresponding drop in libido. The link between low testosterone and erectile dysfunction is less direct, but if you have both conditions, they may be linked.
Restoring balance
If your sex life just isn’t what it used to be and we find that a hormonal imbalance is a factor, there’s good news. We can restore your hormone levels through replacement therapy.
At our practice, we turn to BioTe®, which are bioidentical hormones — meaning they’re molecularly identical to your natural hormones.
With BioTe, we insert slow-release pellets under your skin that deliver hormones into your system, which should help improve your sex life and any other symptoms you may be experiencing because of a hormone imbalance.
If you’d like to figure out whether a hormone imbalance is responsible for your waning sex life and whether hormone replacement therapy is right for you, contact our office in Clayton, Georgia, to set up an appointment.