Cross sex hormones increase risk of stroke and heart attack by as much as 7 times

[Clymene]

Shocking study from the US

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/7de59308-b3b8-11ed-bc64-f71663a88018?shareToken=87b09de880a9c7d1b51942a8bff45e322_

Patients who took hormones had a nearly seven times higher risk of strokes caused by a blockage in blood vessels to the brain compared with those who had never used hormone replacements.

Honestly it's unfathomable to me how people are taking long term medication when there's been no analysis of the risks at all.

Great post @hryllilegur.

I just like to add that around 65% of the US population is on at least one prescription medication, vs about 25% of the UK.

Good grief,that's a staggering statistic.

That is an alarming statistic.

And not really surprising. The pharmaceutical sector in the USA is really worrying. They have a pretty well documented and long history of appalling behaviour that’s caused real social harm.

The statistics about health spending internationally consistently demonstrate that people in the USA spend far more on healthcare (for worse outcomes) than anyone else. It’s a whole system where basic ethical considerations get pushed aside because the most important thing is that corporations make a profit.

That’s not to say that there aren’t loads of HCPs in the USA who do want to practice effective, ethical medicine. But they’re trapped in a system that makes it very hard and distorts things in such a way that it can be almost impossible for them to tell whether what they’re doing is a good thing or not.

The result is a population more heavily dependent on the pharmaceutical industry than anyone else and paying unbelievable amounts for a system in which large numbers of people don’t even have access to healthcare at all.

It’s shocking.

I also very much agree that any claim
that a treatment is ‘life saving’ must be able to quantitatively and convincingly demonstrate that people would die because they did not get that specific treatment. There must be evidence that X number of people died and now they do not because of this treatment. It can’t just be a spurious correlation either. It needs to be causative. Directly causative.

Anything less than that and it’s just manipulative and unethical. It’s not acceptable to simply insist that deaths by suicide or murder are prevented by hormonal treatment or surgery.

I’d also say that there’s an ethical imperative to show that the treatment being championed is more effective than alternative treatments - especially where the alternatives are less invasive and don’t lead to life long negative consequences. There is an important balance to be struck there. It doesn’t matter if a treatment is incredibly effective if it leaves you with lifelong disability that impairs your ability to participate in society - unless immediate and pretty much guaranteed death is the alternative.

Of course the actors who benefit don’t want to do that because it’s highly unlikely that hormonal treatment or surgical interventions to mimic opposite sec characteristics are going to be more effective - or safer - than proper mental health treatment in reducing any suicide (or even self harm rates [1]).

Any claims that healthcare intervention has anything to do with decreasing murder rates is just ridiculous. That’s a completely different kind of problem; you don’t medicate people or surgically operate on them so that they’re less likely to be murdered. Even if you can show that being an ‘untreated’ transperson does increase your risk of being murdered. That does mean ruling out the other factors (like sex work or drug addiction and so on) that contribute to any increased risk of being murdered.

[1] That’s setting aside the important question of whether the treatment itself is not actually a form of medically and socially sanctioned self harm obviously. A questions TRAs really don’t want anyone to be allowed to explore. Which is really weird. It’s almost like they care less about the actual well-being of trans people than in promoting the aims of the medical-pharmaceutical industry.

I wanted to read the study as it's important to know not just the relative risk, that is reported in the Times, but also the absolute risk. (You could have a doubling of a risk, say, which sounds bad until you see the numbers go from 0.02% to 0.04%.) Having said that, seven times sounds massive.

So, wanted to read the study to check out the numbers and methods used. But it is not published (was only presented at a conference which is not the same thing) so it hasn't been subject to the usual peer review that is necessary to get published and therefore accepted as likely to be decent evidence.

I think it's awful reporting and suspect the study was picked up because of the subject matter. The methods might be rubbish, so I'd not take it at face value at all until it's published.

If a drug to treat anything else had such high risks and was still being offered without adequate warning there would be outcry.

If it was prescribed only or mainly to a minority group it would be called an attempt to "cleanse" the population and wipe out that group.

LGBTQ+ groups should be running a massive campaign to urge people not to start these treatments. Surely we should be using psychological treatments to help people accept the incongruity between their birth sex and their gender identity rather than giving them drugs that have such massive risks.

Did you not watch the video? He needs treatment to live, after the hormones he was given [and he never suggested he was trans, that was the idea of the doctors] wrecked his body. It is probably worth a watch to understand the issues here.

Just from personal knowledge there are two issues I know of that can cause issues if you mess around with your hormone levels, a tumour on the pituary gland and Hughes syndrome, also known as “sticky blood syndrome” or antiphospholipid syndrome (APS).

The problem with both of these is most people don't know they have them. In fact most pituitary tumours are only found during autopsy.

Taking additional or cross sex hormones can cause in the worst case death for those with a pituitary tumour.

Hughes syndrome on its own makes a person more likely to get blood clots that could kill you. The addition of additional or cross sex hormones in someone with Hughes syndrome could be fatal.

I don't suppose any tests are done on people before hormones are given. In fact I know they aren't. I had my gynacologist try to put me on hrt until I asked him to look at my medical history. He decided the risk of death was too great due to having both a pituitary tumour and Hughes syndrome. But if I hadn't known I had them? Or that they could be an issue?

Medical in this case but yes, that person could quite easily already be accessing women's spaces.

One concern I have is that more will not medically transition but will claim access to women's single sex spaces based on ideology and feelings.

Also agree a great post @hryllilegur.

A number of women I know have been commenting on the parallels with trans humanism. It's a huge genre certainly in film/ tv that I've seen. I'm sure its elsewhere.

A watched a futuristic series whereby gamers immersed in full virtual reality via robot avatars; of course some cross sex scenes where an actress in a male avatar kissed a woman.

The idea of Switching your body/ sex is completely normal to kids growing up now.

It’s actually amazing that there is no outcry given that these are interventions that sterilise the people who take them.

Why is this being celebrated rather than deplored as a form of eugenics?

It's one of those risk factors that sounds dramatic, but may not be.

After all, it's less than the increased risk following covid, (up to 7.8%). Do you wear a mask at all indoors gatherings? Do you campaign for better ventilation and for air quality monitors?

7% increased risk and 7 times increased risk aren’t the same thing though, are they?

After all, it's less than the increased risk following covid, (up to 7.8%). Do you wear a mask at all indoors gatherings? Do you campaign for better ventilation and for air quality monitors?

i think it’s more like 7 times the risk, so if the original risk was 10%, the risk to transpeople would be 70%.

I didn't watch the video. We're at cross-purposes here (possibly my fault) but I when I wrote my comment I was looking at the comment that said 'When everyone's been told they are going to be suicidal or beaten to death or hurt themselves, I guess you have a free pass to do whatever you like to them and still appear to be the " good guys"'. So I was thinking about how trans activists always claim that if they don't get the treatment they need, gender dysphoric people will kill themselves. And therefore I was making the point that unless there's strong evidence that that is actually the case, then you can't describe cross-sex hormones as life-saving, indeed quite the opposite. The video sounds as if it supports that view.

That was my comment. Thats what I meant. I mean someone requiring medication to actually survive is one thing that's not usually in question. Presumably in most cases we know the consequences of what happens when we don't medically treat people who have a medical condition that requires treating.

But given that what is it 90 percent? Of the kids suffering gender dysphoria grow out if it once puberty is done with, how can there be medical proof that these people will kill themselves if adult males with gender identities have made it to adulthood having done very little to themselves, and the suicide that made the papers was actually in receipt of the very medication that would apparently save their life

Popularising studies before they are peer-reviewed is, unfortunately, now pretty common if the topic is one which creates a lot of advertising revenue -causing clicks. In almost all the cases journalists pick studies from conference presentations. Those presentations are an informal part of the peer review process (the formal is the reviewers assigned by the scientific journal).

And I agree that doing this is not wise as there can be methodological problems in a study which need to be fixed before the results should be discussed more widely. In the majority of cases, though, these studies do end up published pretty much as they are.

But I know one case (not about gender identity issues) where a paper much discussed in the social media never was published at all, presumably because of some serious method problems. Yet to this day I see some mention the paper as real proof about an issue.

I have seen an earlier study (using Kaiser-Permanente patient data) which found similar patterns, i.e., much elevated stroke and heart disease risks for both transwomen and transmen, though the two groups were not affected exactly equally. So these findings may very well hold in the peer review.

We urgently need a good study about suicide rates among trans-identified people, both pre-transition and post-transition, which would properly take into account and control for other conditions which people may have and which are also linked to higher suicide risks (several mental disorders etc.). This would allow better assessing of the competing health risks when it comes to treatment.

Right now the debate on the suicide risk is meaningless as nobody accepts the data from the other side, as self-reporting about suicidal ideation is not the same thing as completing a suicide, and as the real comparisons should be between otherwise comparable groups which do not differ in, say, the prevalence of mental disorders unrelated to the trans status etc.

The recent CDC survey in the US found very high rates of suicidal ideation among teen girls. It's worth remembering that suicidal ideation is not uncommon among teens, in general, and vulnerable teens, in particular.

There has been a study of suicide in Sweden (several Scandinavian countries hold a lot of data on their population that can be pulled for this sort of study). It found that post-transition suicide rates were, if I remember correctly, nine times higher than the rest of the population. The author tried to excuse it as down to lack of acceptance (ie the world didn’t change to meet their fantasy), but they couldn’t hide the fact that suicide was a lot higher in transitioned men.

The initial study Stonewall and Mermaids used to quote to justify teenagers transitioning, PACE, had just 27 self-selecting transgender participants who were recorded as under 26 (so possibly none were teenagers) and it was also not recorded whether the 13 who reported a suicide attempt made that attempt before or AFTER transitioning.

www.transgendertrend.com/the-suicide-myth/

@hryllilegur " It’s not acceptable to simply insist that deaths by suicide or murder are prevented by hormonal treatment or surgery. "

Especially when that treatment/surgery, is primarily for the treatment or prevention of cancer only!

What, if any, studies have been done, do we know, to investigate the possibilities of giving oestrogen to males who might be susceptible to oestrogen positive breast cancer, or haven't they bothered with that either?!