I have some good news from the Specialist Pharmacy in London. They have now developed the sublingual, body identical progesterone drops after clinical trials. They also have a cream and fast release tablets available.
I'm still working my way through my lozenge prescription but I am going to try the drops when I have finished the batch.
It's good to know there are some different forms of body identical progesterone available now.
It ia always good to hear about different forms of progesterone being developed for the benefit of those who don't get on well with the ones currently available.
I have some things to say about this. First I would hope if there have been clinical trials then these will be published in a peer reviewed paper to be avialble to the whole scientific/research community. If it does work well for different doses of oestrogen and over the typical periods of time that is needed to study the effectiveness in protecting the endometrium, with minimal side effects - then hopefully a pharma compa ny could develop a product for commercial use and available on NHS. My main gripe with all of this is firstly the lack of (published) trials and secondly that all of these sorts of products are really only available to the very few who can afford the high prices charged so anything to make these products more wudely available to all has to be good.
From a biological point of view I wonder about the value of sub-lingual delivery of progesterone in terms of side effects. With oestrogen - a spray ( or sub-lingual - though I don't know about what is available here?), the main aim is to get it into the blood stream as quickly as possible I think.
However with progesterone - I would intuitively think that taking it sub-lingually would cause a rapid burst/spike of progesterone in the body, which, because of its instability in the body will decline over the course of the day - so actually leading to more artificially induced diurnal fluctuations (daily peaks and troughs) and therefore potentially more side effects. Because progesterone is not stored anywhere then I'm sort of thinking that a big dose would still be needed to counter this breakdown - eg when compared to vaginal use which goes straight to the uterus and in my view from what I've read, is the best method of delivery to protect the endometrium. I can imagine there would be fewer side effects from sub-lingual use than oral but not compared with vaginal maybe?
If the proposed sub-lingual delivery is more frequently than once per day this would make more sense if women were able to remember to take it, because the ovary pumps out progesterone normally in regular pulses throughout the day (?and night) - once per day of a large dose is unnatural hence we (many of us) experience moreside effects.
Re cream - the same argument applies. Publish the data showing efficacy and fewer side effects then pharma develop a standard product available to all if possible!
Hurdity x