Ok this has bothered me for some time because I remember reading a post on here a while back where someone stated that taking spiro decreases a certain hormone or growth hormone (HGH?) and decreases your body's natural production of estrogen, leaving most estrogen coming from the patch/pill/injection. Is this at all true? If it is, can someone please explain it to me and how spiro affects estrogen production? Thanks girls! God bless :)
Aside from being a hypertension drug, Spironolactone in HRT is used as an anti androgen. (testosterone killah!) The point in estrogen (in whatever form) is because the adrenals can't produce enough estrogen to prevent the side effects of low sex steroids. (namely osteoporosis, but other nasty effects too)
hope this helps
Spiro shouldn't drop your E levels.
I am post-op M to F and I took spiro for about six years before surgery. I read that spiro is a diuretic that is used to control hypertension and it has a side effect of blocking androgens, as opposed to estrogen.
My body could not produce sufficient estrogen to give me the feminizing that I needed, therefore, I took estrogen, along with spiro, under a doctor's supervision.
In a word, the answer is no.
Wing Walker
spiro is a diuretic and is labeled for use in treating blood pressure. Using it in HRT seems to be an off label use, but whatever.
It shouldn't affect your E levels at all. Spiro is actually a general androgen blocker that binds to androgen receptors in your body. The sequestering of available receptors means that T has nowhere to bind, and should make your body think your blood levels of T are higher than they should be-- your body doesn't know that you're taking androgen receptor blockers, the feedback mechanism assumes that T binds to receptors, and whatever is left in the blood isn't really needed above a certain baseline level. Anyway, once the body sees that T levels are higher than necessary, that there's excess in your blood that's not binding to receptors, T production levels should drop a bit.
I believe there's a correlation between T levels and vasoconstriction (which can be one cause of high blood pressure. Can't recall off the top of my head right now.