Oh, even with 300 mg progesterone I could never sleep as well as before perimenopause; I'm envious! I sleep okay on slynd, not the best over, but well enough, and I couldn't sleep on anything less than 200 mg micronized progesterone every night.
I can tell you I also found those reports of hair loss on slynd and was scared; I had already lost so much hair. I had the same issues as you, did great until I needed more estrogen, then started bleeding way too often. No amount of progesterone seemed to fix this and re-establish the balance (that's how I got put on 300 mg progesterone for a while). I tried going back down on estrogen, but had tons of problems, so I got put on Slynd.
I have been working on the hair loss for years now, so I can tell you one thing I've been told by doctors is that we are often seeing the results of things impacting our hair 3 months later -- so if something improves the state of hair it can also take 3 months to show. Things can cause immediate hair loss, but also may show up /later/ -- which can complicate knowing what hrt dose is affecting our hair, if we are making changes. My practitioner also says merely /making/ changes can cause hair loss, which may regrow when we are stable at a dose, or making changes too quickly can cause hair loss. She has encouraged me to make changes slowly.
My tentative conclusion after reading Slynd reviews was the people reporting hair loss were using Slynd for birth control. This is significant, because Slynd affects your body's natural production of estrogen, so it was /reducing/ their levels of estrogen. I think, fortunately and unfortunately, it means that may be less relevant for those of us on estradiol, but it makes sense it would still be a risk.
So far on the Slynd (one month) I would say it is either the same or maybe a very slight increase in the hair loss I was having on micronized progesterone, but I've only been on it a month and I think it has slightly affected my estrogen. My clinician said it was effectively a higher dose than 200 mg micronized progesterone. I noticed minor differences in my skin that can happen around the lowest estrogen part of my cycle are continuous now. If I am still noticing that in a couple months, I might increase my estradiol.
There are reports that Slynd also helps with hair loss, so I am going to try it for another couple months at least. When I've finished 3 months I'll update about it, including hair loss information. One thing I'm curious about is the slynd metabolizes much more slowly than the micronized progesterone, so it stays in your system the better part of 24 hours. I am curious if this will help with hair loss, because when my hair loss was best was when I was at a higher progesterone dose and didn't need as much estrogen to balance it.
Did you notice anything about what improved your hair loss or made it worse? You seem to have a similar profile and I have some theories, but it doesn't seem like clinicians are totally clear about this. I can tell you my hair loss got temporarily a lot better when I started hrt -- I regrew most of my lost hair. Then later in increasing my estradiol doses I lost even more. I'm not sure if this was from making so many changes, or because my dose of progesterone wasn't working well enough as my estrogen got higher.
