Weird advice to say come off the patch completely, In my opinion… 🤔
what symptoms initially led you to taking HRT? How are those symptoms at the moment?
I have had migraines all my life on and off, and luckily the GP that initially diagnosed peri menopause and gave me HRT (aged 41) also happens to be specialist in headache/migraines.
She was fantastic explaining how, it’s not so much the level of hormone that causes the headache, but the change in level (either up or down) during your monthly cycle. Sensitive brains get disrupted by the change and can get inflamed temporarily.
I initially got bad headaches on HRT but found they got better after a few months as my body/brain got used to it.
For various reasons though, I went from 25 mg to 50 after 3 months, to 75 after 6 months (to help manage other symptoms, mainly mental health related)
My feeling is that, since a lot of our peri symptoms (which vary from person to person) are caused by the lack of estrogen, if you take a higher dose, it can help smooth out these extremes. So, you’re still getting highs and lows through your cycle, but less of a radical jump.
So personally I would say don’t stop the estrogen, not least because your other symptoms will come back, but consider going to a slightly higher dose?
Most importantly though, keep a symptom diary.
Hormones change most things slowwwwwly so if you can refer back to your symptom diary you can more easily judge what’s working/what’s not.