Essentials: How to Optimize Female Hormone Health for Vitality & Longevity | Dr. Sara Gottfried

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Doctor. Sarah Gottfried. Doctor. Gottfried, Sarah, welcome. Thank you. So happy to be here. Yeah. I'm delighted and very excited to ask you about an enormous number of topics. You are expert in so many things, female hormones in particular. Is it ever informative for a woman, regardless of age, to know something about her mother's, perhaps even her grandmother's experience vis a vis hormones? What sorts of conversations should women be having with themselves and with family members to get a window into what their specific needs might be? So my work is really at the interface between genetics and environment. And I think it's essential that you understand what your grandmother went through and especially your mother. So I would probably start first with trauma and intergenerational trauma because I think that affects the endocrine system so hugely, especially cortisol signaling. And then there's certain female conditions that have a very strong component genetically, most of which run-in my family. So that includes endometriosis, fibroids, and polycystic ovarian syndrome. Maybe we could march through and just say, for a woman in her teens who's already hit puberty, what sorts of biomarkers should those young women be paying attention to? Likewise, for women in their twenties, thirties, maybe we could take it more or less by by decade at starting at puberty. In your teenage years, what I think is really interesting is to look at cortisol. To look at the dance between estrogen and progesterone in those years is less helpful because I think there's a lot of variability due to the immaturity of the system. If you've got someone who's got really regular periods, it's probably better to do some benchmarking at that age. But generally, I find that benchmarking is best performed in your twenties or thirties. Are periods not that regular in terms of duration of the menstrual cycle when the menstrual cycle first sets in? For a lot of women, they're not regular. And then there's the whole piece of oral contraceptives and other forms of contraception where you have no idea what the normal cycle is. But getting back to your original question, which is about biomarkers per decade, in your twenties, that's when you wanna do some base casing with estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. What happens a lot of the time is that estrogen dominates in that tango. And when that happens, it sets you up for greater risk of fibroids, endometriosis. I'd wanna know about DHEA and sort of the whole androgen pathway. I'd wanna know about the metabolites of estrogen because some of them are protective and very helpful. Others are a bit like Homer Simpson. I mean, they are just like …