Use of Androgens in Postmenopausal Women

During menopause, women may experience greater loss of bone mineral density, leading to a high risk of fractures. Estradiol has great importance in the maintenance of bone micro architecture and estradiol and testosterone combination have high effectiveness in preventing osteoporosis and fractures in post menopausal women. There is an actual trend of using testosterone combined with estradiol in order to improve the hypo androgen symptoms with an important improvement in the quality of life of these women. The behavior of the lipid profile in women using this combination is not well defined once the results of the studies already made are very controversial. This review article aims at evaluating the studies made in the last years that evaluated the impact of the use of androgens in post menopause women over a bone mineral density and the lipid profile. Searches of articles were made on Pubmed from 1980 to 2011. The searches were made with the use of the keywords 'testosterone' or 'androgens' and 'postmenopausal women' and 'bone density' and 'hormone replacement therapy'. In its second phase the 'testosterone' or 'androgens' and 'postmenopausal women' and 'lipoprotein' and 'hormone replacement'. A total of 67 articles were found. After reading their whole content, 09 original articles were included in this review, prospective that evaluated bone mineral density or the lipid profile in patients using hormone therapy in post menopause. The benefits of the use of androgens have been demonstrated in publications resulting from studies with a reduced number of patients, in non-probabilistic samples, and most of them observational. On the other hand, the results converge towards an improvement of the lipid profile and increase in the bone mineral density in the patients in post menopause. The greater limitation of these results lies on the difficulty on determining the isolated effects of the androgens once the studies showed results obtained through HT with estradiol and androgens. Clinical rehearsals in comparison between the use of isolated estradiol and estardiol + testosterone shall clarify the impact of this combination under the lipid profile and bone protection in postmenopausal patients.