A new study has raised concerns about the effects of synthetic hormone oestrogen use on males who say they identify as female.
The study, Emerging and accumulating safety signals for the use of estrogen among transgender women, claims that the use of cross-sex hormones in males can lead to increased instances of blood clots, brain changes, cancer, infertility, as well as other conditions.
In its introduction, the authors reference the European Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (ESCAP) policy statement regarding care for adolescents and children with gender dysphoria which it says calls for “safeguarding clinical, scientific and ethical standards”.
The paper states that due to “the rapid increase in presenting cases among young people, extensive scrutiny has now been brought to bear on these medical interventions for minors”, with ESCAP reporting “an urgent need for safeguarding clinical, scientific, and ethical standards,” but that the risk-benefit profile of these interventions is “unknown”.
The authors say that several recent systematic reviews have found “the evidence of benefit to be of low or very low certainty, while some risks, such as infertility, have been long recognized.”
The study contains several emerging and accumulating safety signals in medical literature ranging from increased rates of previously associated adverse outcomes with long-term oestrogen use (e.g., acute cardiovascular events) to associations of oestrogen use with newly identified adverse outcomes.
It says that oestrogen also “induces changes in the brain, raising concerns for negative impacts on mood (e.g., depression) and cognition” and that such safety signal “ indicate the need for further investigation and a thorough systematic search for others, which may now be more evident due to the increased number of young people receiving these treatments.”
The authors state that there is an “urgent need” for the evidence base to be improved with more studies, “especially those with systematic long-term follow-up and those that can disentangle possible confounders, as well as systematic reviews to help interpret their reliability.”
The paper also draws attention to the”poorly understood but significant” increase in the number of young people claiming to suffer from gender dysphoria over recent decades- citing a 50-fold increase in the England – while also highlighting the number of those who discontinue treatment “due to a multitude of reasons”.