Hormone Health Hub: Expert Insights on Testing, Balance & Better Living — breast cancer

By Sherry LaBeck, ND. ZRT Laboratory. It is highly likely that women aged 60 to 90 have vivid memories of the astonishing healthcare news from 2002 when the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), a comprehensive long-term national health study, was abruptly terminated earlier than expected. The initial trial results sent shockwaves through the medical community and had a profound impact on the lives of numerous women. Furthermore, this news fundamentally transformed the perception of routine menopausal hormone replacement prescriptions for years to follow. The WHI was launched in 1991 as a 15-year trial, one of the largest women’s health studies in the...

Heavy metal exposure can affect a child's development, immune function, and long-term health. At-home heavy metals testing using dried blood and urine spots helps parents detect toxic metals like arsenic, mercury, and cadmium, while also assessing essential elements such as iodine, selenium, and zinc — enabling early intervention and tailored nutritional support.

By Shera Dubitsky I was 19 years old when my mom died of metastatic breast cancer. From that point forward, I identified as a “patient-in-waiting.” In my narrative I, of course, would eventually be diagnosed with breast cancer, it was only a matter of when. Each time I went for a screening, I thought, “Is this the time? Will I finally move from patient-in-waiting to just patient?” Every time I felt a change in my body I thought, “Oh this must be cancer.” (Except for the time I had pain in my back and tried to convince my husband I had...

  By Dr.David Zava, ZRT Laboratory In 2002 several large-scale clinical studies were published on the risks of breast cancer in postmenopausal women using conventional FDA-approved hormone therapy. These were the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) and Million Women’s studies of women using FDA-approved estrogens and progestogens in the United States and Great Britain, respectively [1,2]. Both studies came to the same conclusion – that estrogen therapy, mostly in the form of oral conjugated equine estrogens, by itself did not significantly increase the risk of breast cancer and, to the surprise of many, was associated with a lower risk. However, when estrogen...

Single nucleotide variations (SNVs) in the enzymes that metabolise estrogen can significantly alter breast cancer risk — in some cases by as much as 12-fold when multiple variants combine. In this detailed scientific overview, Jillian Harrington PhD of ZRT Laboratory explains how variations in CYP11A1, CYP19A1 (aromatase), CYP1B1, COMT and MnSOD affect the estrogen metabolism pathway, why catechol estrogens are dangerous, and how methylation testing can reveal individual vulnerability.