Monday, January 26, 2009

fibroids and fertility drugs

Unfortunately my last cycle was not successful for getting pregnant. So now my gyn wants to use ovarian stimulation, which makes more eggs to increase your chances each cycle.

Most gyn's use a drug for Clomid for this. I've heard all sorts of terrible things about Clomid, and one of the women on the uterine fibroid list-serv I'm on mentioned that her fibroids grew a lot when she took it.

However, my gyn uses something called Letrozole. I am supposed to start taking it today, and I am doing a bit of Google research on it. It seems the advantage of Letrozole is that it doesn't stay in your system as long as Clomid, and thus doesn't have the same problem of thinning your endometrial lining or cervical mucus like Clomid does.

I found this page with lots of detail about Letrozole. Evidently it's an aromatase inhibitor. I recall some recent discussion on the fibroid list-serv with one woman mentioning how they had used natural aromatase inhibitors to work on shrinking their fibroids, but I didn't look into that carefully as I thought it might impact my fertility. And this page (http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/18/8/1598) talks about how Letrozole has been successfully used to shrink fibroids. And this page (www.obgyn.net/fibroid-resource-center/?page=forum/FIBROIDS.0901/0039) shows the study. In this study the subjects took Letrozole for 12 weeks, much longer than the 5 days I will be taking it, but still this is very interesting and makes me feel better about it.

This page (http://www.annieappleseedproject.org/arindom.html) has detailed information on aromatase inhibitors, both natural and synthetic, and how they might effect estrogen, estrogen dominance, and fibroids.

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