Puberty Blockers - impact on the brain

I wonder if there are situations where it gives up permanently and in that case I guess there will be no reversibility and the person will be on actual HRT for life with all the health risks that entails.

Just to post a quote about bone density.

It depends what you mean, by reversible,’ says Dr Richard Quinton, an endocrinologist and senior lecturer at Newcastle University. ‘When the blockers wear off, a young person’s own sex hormones will “wake up” again,’ he says. ‘This includes a resumption of fertility, but the process of building stronger teenage bones is disrupted and may not be entirely recoverable.’

In today’s Telegraph. Maybe this ‘doctor’ is worthy of listening to for those who continue to handwave the negative effects of puberty blockers. Or who continue to spread misinformation about the irreversible nature of these drugs.

I think it is that suicide ideation is no more common than in other children with mental health problems (rather than when compared with all children)

It's just all leverage.

That is the most shocking thing about it. It also seems to be why the health risk for young female transitioners are ignored or downplayed with a ‘I know many transmen’ like it is a gotcha. It isn’t. And the long term side effects are known and sadly, most apply to females not males. Always feel like they are ignored to progress another groups needs over their’s.

Well well,sheep have a gender identity? Please tell me more. ( Sheep farmer here). I'd hate to upset my girls by inadvertently misgendering them.

and just so we are clear for some people, even GIDS is clear that suicide ideation in gender dypshoric children is no greater than other children so that would not be a valid justification for such children to take puberty blockers.

There also appears to be absolutely no curiosity from some posters as to why so many children are dysphoric.

It's just all leverage.

Why are so many children thinking that the grass, any grass, where ever it is, must be so much greener than their own grass??

and just so we are clear for some people, even GIDS is clear that suicide ideation in gender dypshoric children is no greater than other children so that would not be a valid justification for such children to take puberty blockers.

I think it’s going to continue to get wheeled out at every opportunity, regardless because facts! And science!

sophaclesthefox

I think that posters either haven’t looked at the 50+ studies or think we won’t. The poster a few months ago posted it and used the ‘here’s 50 studies that disagree’ and I pointed out each of the first 15 why they didn’t covered the topic under discussion. And then just grouped the others into subsets as to why they weren’t applicable. I didn’t get a thank you for doing it though.

Including the admission early on that there was too little research into the negative effects of puberty blockers.

Chilling, gardenbird

From various articles available on Lupron which as I understand it, is typical of the class of drugs commonly used as puberty blockers. I know there are a few different types but presumably as they are broadly similar in their function, they may have broadly similar issues?

This first article sounds rather concerning. An IQ drop of 8 points is initially dismissed as not significant but in the same way as the lack of increase in bone density at an absolutely key stage of development (where it should be increasing enormously), any drop in IQ at this stage of a child's life and development should be huge cause for concern. Reports from individual patients show a more serious situation for some children.

A study of GnRHa’s in 2001 showed “IQ levels decreased significantly” (a mean 7 point drop, but “doubts exist about the clinical relevance”), and in 2016 another GnRHa study reported an IQ drop of around 8 points was noted (which was found in the study to be “not significant”). These studies were conducted outside the US, but within the US Lupron dominates the market. Where are the pediatric (or adult) Lupron IQ studies, and why do these pediatric studies dismiss the significant decreases in IQ? Wouldn’t any IQ drop of 8 points be significant? This is information that would be critical to the decision-making of any parent/child. And the “doubts” about clinical relevance and ‘non-significance’ of GnRHa-induced intelligence decline should be pursued by the media – and medicine.

One mother who contacted me reported after the first Lupron injection her child experienced:

“Complete inability to focus on anything – grades plummeted … couldn’t remember where either tooth paste or brush were located, or sock drawer. Could not repeat simple instructions or follow them. Our sunshine child was sad and without typical ‘I can do anything’ attitude.”
“My own story is that after taking Lupron [for endometriosis] I now have bone loss, severe bone and joint pain requiring heavy painkillers to get out of bed, chest pain, tachycardia, fibromyalgia and horrible memory loss, hair loss and weight gain. Prior to Lupron I ran and boxed everyday. I was healthy even though endometriosis caused significant pain. It has now been a year since my Lupron treatments and my life is in medical shambles.”
The FDA reports that, as long ago as 1999, it had received adverse drug reports about Lupron® from 4,228 women and 2,943 men.1 These side effects included: tingling, itching, headache and migraine, dizziness, severe joint pain, difficulty breathing, chest pain, nausea, depression, emotional instability, dimness of vision, fainting, weakness, amnesia, hypertension, muscular pain, bone pain, nausea/vomiting, asthma, abdominal pain, insomnia, chronic enlargement of the thyroid, liver function abnormality, vision abnormality, and anxiety, and others.2 In 325 of these cases, the women required hospitalization; 25 women died.3 At the time, the FDA said that it did not have enough staff capacity to assess any causal effect in these cases.

As with many drugs, side effects have long been a problem. More than 20,000 adverse-event reports have been filed with the FDA in the last decade. Women have reported to the FDA hundreds of cases of insomnia, depression, joint pain, and more than 100 cases of blurred vision. About 900 reports cite side effects that children below age 13 have suffered, mostly within months of taking Lupron. Those reports frequently note injection-site pain but also include dozens of cases of bone problems, such as pain or disorders, and the inability to walk.

www.hormonesmatter.com/lupron-precocious-puberty-decades-regulatory-silence/

www.statnews.com/2017/02/02/lupron-puberty-children-health-problems/
nwhn.org/lupron-what-does-it-do-to-womens-health/

It may not give you the raw data you're looking for but I do wonder about research she's drawn on for it.

I do think looking at PB precocious puberty use is a good area.

The other angle that I’ve come at this from, given the dearth of research on puberty blockers themselves, is to look at the literature on what does happen, cognitively speaking, during puberty, that we can suppose will be impacted or hindered by using GnRHa blockers. It’s not just sex hormones that get blocked, is it?

I’m mid way through this fascinating article:
The Teenage Brain: Surging Hormones—Brain-Behavior Interactions During Puberty journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0963721412473755

There’s just so much that goes on! Highly recommend a read. The more I think and read on this, the more I think that blocking natural hormones and substituting exogenous ones is fraught with unknown danger.

Sophoclesthefox

Yes. I pointed that out to a poster a few months ago. The current cohort of Female children and teen transitioners are not covered in that group of studies.

Wasn't there research at Cambridge looking at detransitioners that was cancelled because it was politically incorrect?

Exactly, there's that too.

Trans men have normal bone density:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6709704/

Once again, Shizuku's links don't say what Shizuku says they do. That is a review paper, and on the subject of bone density and bone mass in adolescents who take hormone blockers followed by opposite sex hormones it links to a few studies, including this one:

academic.oup.com/jcem/article/100/2/E270/2814818
In conclusion, this is the first study on the effects of early medical intervention of adolescents with GD regarding bone mass and demonstrates a loss of LS BMD z score at age 22 years.

We don't know how many detransitioned - that came out in the Bell case. They just didn't turn up for appointments and no follow up effort was made. For distressed children. Shameful.

Wasn't there research at Cambridge looking at detransitioners that was cancelled because it was politically incorrect?

Also, how many detransitioned? So fell off or decided to opt out of the research?

A further difficulty with the project’s narrative is that findings associating transition with immediate improvements in perceived well-being do not necessarily contradict the accounts of many persons who later came to regret transition. Those who regret transition often report that they initially felt better; only as time passed did they realize that transition had not resolved underlying problems. Furthermore, reliance on self-reported metrics is a poor substitute for objective evaluations; it is a commonplace that those who are struggling often insist that they are just fine.

Thus, there is a need for longitudinal studies to assess the medium-to-long-term effects of transition on well-being. Unfortunately, many of the longitudinal studies touted by the What We Know Project are crippled by low response rates as well as self-reported data. For instance, a European studyy^ of patients who had undergone surgical transition had only sixty-two of 107 patients participate (58 percent), while thirty could not be reached and fifteen refused. Another European studyy^ had 201 out of 546 respond—just 37 percent. In addition to these poor response rates, some follow-up studies were also extremely small, such as a samplee^ of twelve FtM patients (out of seventeen) who completed a survey after breast reduction surgery.

It is possible that those who cooperate with long-term studies are representative of those who cannot be found or refuse to participate. It is even possible that non-participants are doing better than those who take part in follow-up studies. But it is also possible that the pool of non-participants is where bad outcomes are most likely to be found—not just those with regrets, but also the depressed, the addicted, the homeless, and the dead. It is reasonable to suppose (and some researchh^ suggests) that those with worse outcomes would be unreachable or uncooperative. Of course, this remains speculative so long as so much data is missing. What is clear is that is it reckless to ignore the low response rate of longitudinal studies when promoting them.

Just some of the criticisms of the studies in the Cornell paper.

The right care and input alongside normal brain pubertal development.

In fact the reworking of the brain during puberty is more pertinent to children who have perhaps have had a lot of trauma in their lives.

My LA basic safeguarding course always talks about how the right input and care at that age can have a positive impact on the brain, behaviour and cognitive development.

(We look at the brain 0-3 and then the brain in puberty in relation to cognition, behaviour, trauma and safeguarding.)

I know you love that Cornell study, and cite it repeatedly

It's really not the slam dunk shizuku thinks.

www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2019/04/51524/

Jazz's mum complaining to other mums that she is worried Jazz isn't using their dialator properly and consistently, that she hands Jazz the dialator and says 'do it or I will do it myself' and that if Jazz doesn't use it properly at college and 'that thing seals up' she will 'wring her neck'

That was truly shocking. And not much about this shocks me.