What the Heck is Up with Cholesterol During Menopause? with Samia Mora, MD, MHS (Episode 167)

Hit Play Not Pause

Health & Fitness, Medicine, Fitness

4.9 • 769 Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2024

⏱️ 76 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We wrap up heart health awareness month with one topic that comes up a whole lot in our community–cholesterol. We hear from scores of athletic, active women who have had perfectly fine lipid levels their whole lives only to see them shoot up, often dramatically, at menopause. If you’re one, you’re not alone. This week we take a deep dive into all things lipids, including what they are, what influences them, and what to do about them, with cardiologist and lipid and women’s health specialist Dr. Samia Mora.

Samia Mora, MD, MHS, is a cardiologist and molecular epidemiologist conducting translational research in the prevention of cardiometabolic disease, with a focus on lipid and inflammatory mechanisms of cardiovascular disease. She is the Director of the Center for Lipid Metabolomics and Director of the Biorepository, Divisions of Preventive and Cardiovascular Medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. Dr. Mora is also a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. You can learn more about her and her work at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Resources

Rethinking Menopausal Hormone Therapy: For Whom, What, When, and How Long? here

NAMS 2022 Hormone Therapy Position Statement here

7 Countries Study here

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to Hit Play, Not Pause, a feisty menopause podcast for active performance-minded women.
0:14.6	I am your host, Celine Yeager. Each week, I bring you advice from athletes, scientists, researchers, and other experts to help you feel and perform you best no matter what your hormones are doing.
0:25.0	This show is a production of Live Feisty Media.
0:30.3	Hello, strong, feisty women.
0:33.0	Okay, we cannot turn the calendar page on Heart Health Awareness Month without a super deep dive into one topic that comes up a whole lot in our community, cholesterol.
0:45.7	I hear from dozens, maybe hundreds of active athletic women who have had perfectly fine lipid levels their whole lives, only to see them shoot up, often dramatically, at menopause.
0:56.9	If you're one, you're not alone, I'm with you.
1:01.0	So I have been wanting to sit down with an expert on all things lipids for some time now,
1:06.0	and I found one in this week's guest, Dr. Samia Mora.
1:10.2	She is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical
1:12.9	School, and she is also a cardiologist at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, and there she is also
1:18.7	the director of the Center for Lipid Metabolomics. We talk all about cholesterol, all the types of
1:26.4	lipids that we should be watching, including APOB and
1:29.5	LP-P-L-A, as well as how we should be thinking about our cardiovascular disease risk specifically
1:36.1	as women, and that's different than we think about it for men, and of course, what to do about it.
1:41.3	This is a pretty science-dense one here, but we try to bring it together in
1:44.7	plain terms throughout the episode. I will also note that we talk about the women's health
1:50.7	initiative or WHOI findings. And I bring this up in the intro because as we were talking and
1:57.3	as she was explaining the research, I was thinking, there are going to be members
2:01.6	of the audience who get ruffled up hearing this discussion on the women's health initiative
2:06.3	because every time that comes up, people get a little ruffled because the WHO has taken a
2:12.6	beating in the mainstream media and especially in social media as of late.
	...

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