Pre-Menopause Oophorectomy Side Effects Worse With Letrozole?
I had a bilateral salpingo oophorectomy (BSO/ovary removal) on March 4th. I had not begun menopause (based on MO ordered hormone tests). The side effects I've had since that surgery are debilitating. I'm supposed to start taking Letrozole tomorrow. I'm trying to find out (no response from SO or MO) if the symptoms will increase greatly with the start of Letrozole, or if they are already so extreme from the forced menopause that adding Letrozole won't make much of a difference in terms of symptoms increasing. Thanks in advance to anyone who has undergone BSO AND taken Letrozole who can speak to this.
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Hi,
Sorry you are having a hard time after the BSO.
I got BSO and started Anastrozole (another AI) a month later, so it was too close for me to have noticed the difference. What I can say is my body adapted to the lack of estrogen after a few months and the side effects (moods, hot flashes, insomnia) got a lot better. And it ALL improved a lot with exercise -especially swimming-, just as the psychiatric oncologist I consulted told me they would.
Take care,LaughingGull
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Thanks for sharing LaughingGull; I really appreciate it! Glad to hear symptoms improved. I do a lot of running, walking, cycling so will keep at that and hope things get better.
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I started lupron shots and was on my third month before I started the AIs. I will say that I definitely felt an increase in symptoms (the worst for me has been hot flashes) by adding the AIs. I ended up finding that relizen and gabapentin helped make sleep manageable. Earlier this year, I got a salpingo oopherectomy, and I would say that my symptoms got worse again after the surgical suppression (which tbh makes me feel better/safer about getting it). It's been about 2.5 months since my surgery and I'm just now starting to feel like the symptoms are easing back.
I don't know that doctors can make very effective predictions about stuff like this - it ends up being very individual. I think the question is more like would you rather risk having more severe effects at once but also hopefully get to a place of normalization or at least manageability sooner, or would you rather drag it out over a longer span of time but hopefully less severe. I don't think there's a right and wrong here.
What would be wrong is if your doctors are not following up with you on managing/easing your side effects. It can take a while for meds to start helping and it's trial and error which meds will actually help you, but there's no reason to be a martyr and not try anything
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