At 72 years old, Danniella Edlund is living a life that many could only wish for, regardless of age. After a long and successful career in the wedding industry, handling catering, floral arrangements, and video production, as well as time spent as the owner of a bed and breakfast in Northern Virginia, Danniella can now add “trophy-winning ballroom dancer” to her list of accomplishments.

Along with her instructor, Charles Michael McCaffrey of the Arthur Murray Studio in Venice, Florida, Danniella was thrilled to bring home the first-place trophy in the “Best Overall Newcomer Dance” category at an Arthur Murray dance competition held this past October in Las Vegas. According to Danniella, the pair also earned 25 first-place medals, five second-place medals, and three third-place medals in nine different dances, including the w altz, foxtrot, tango, rumba, cha-cha, mambo, meringue, swing, and hustle. Even more impressive, she adds, nine of those first-place awards beat out dancers in a younger age group.

“I started ballroom dancing a year ago in January and it has filled my life with a great deal of excitement and fitness,” Danniella shares. “I’m sure it has to do with the bio-identical hormones I’m taking.”

About a year and a half ago, she says, her body just wasn’t feeling right. “I was feeling like a tree trunk. I’m very female, but I wasn’t feeling female. I’ve had a little bit of nurse’s training, and I know what happens to hormones,” Danniella explains. “I was just not exuberant about life, and I think life has a lot to be exuberant about.”

After seeing a television ad for HRC Medical Center Tampa, Danniella says she decided to attend a seminar to find out about the bio-identical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT) program. “After the seminar, I wanted to do it,” she says. “These are human identical hormones, different from the chemical ones. I’ve always been pretty holistic. I’m very knowledgeable about nutrition and I always opt to go the natural way.”

Feeling educated and empowered, Danniella began the therapy at HRC Medical Center Tampa, under the care of staff physician John Carrozzella, MD. “I think Dr. Carrozzella is just the most dedicated person,” she shares. “He is interested, knowledgeable, and professional. He listens and spends time with you, and he’s willing to work with you to get to the point where you are feeling the best you can.”

For his part, Dr. Carrozzella is equally impressed with Danniella. “She had a particularly difficult menopause, but she started doing hormone replacement and now the improvement of her energy and her activity level has been dramatic, to the point where she feels really revitalized. She’s been winning awards in ballroom dancing with younger men, so she’s quite a model for the vitality and the energy that hormone balancing can provide.

“She has a youthfulness about her that is just uncanny for someone seventy-two years old.”

“Something was off”

An active runner who prided herself on taking the proactive approach to health and aging, Lisa Smith began to feel like she needed answers. “I had fatigue, low libido, difficulty losing weight, and night sweats,” she shares. “My hair was falling out, I was tired. By noon, I would be completely exhausted. It was horrible. I could tell something was off.

“And two years ago, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), so that was a shock,” she adds.

Concerned, Lisa stepped up her good health efforts even further. “I thought: be proactive, work out, change your diet – not that I ate bad, but I cleaned it up even more. I then added weight training two days a week, on top of the running, and still nothing was helping.”

After visiting a gynecological endocrinologist who basically told her, she says, to “lay off the Doritos,” and consulting a specialist to have her hormone levels tested, Lisa decided to visit HRC Medical Center Tampa on the recommendation of a trusted friend who was having good results with the therapy. “I trust my friend and I figured, at this point, what was the worst that could happen? Nothing else was working,” she explains.

Prior to her appointment at HRC Medical Center Tampa, Lisa says she did a lot of research. “I read up on BHRT. At my first consult, I brought in a notebook and I had tons of questions. They sat with me for over an hour.”

About two weeks after beginning the program, in April of 2011, Lisa says that she began to notice changes. “I remember I was out of town and I had incredible surges of energy. Everyday, I was like, Okay, this is what it’s supposed to do, whereas before, eight or nine hours of sleep just wasn’t enough, like I was overtired. But with the treatment, I could sleep six hours and be absolutely fine.”

Another significant benefit of the treatment relates to Lisa’s arthritic condition. “Because of the rheumatoid arthritis, I had been on Enbrel and Humara,” she notes. “I didn’t feel comfortable putting drugs in my system, but I knew that was the treatment for my condition. Again, I did a lot of research and stopped taking my weekly injections for the rheumatoid arthritis. Since it takes about three months to really kick in, stopping the medication was a big risk for me to be able to function, but I decided to dive in and just go with the natural instead of putting chemicals in my system.

“Knock on wood, I have not used any of the RA medications since. I’m managing my symptoms. It hasn’t taken the RA away, but I don’t need to use the Enbrel or the Humara to relieve the pain.”

And thanks to the personalized treatment she’s received at HRC Medical Center Tampa, Lisa feels she’s definitely on the right track. “Dr. Carrozzella is cool. He’s so informative and takes the time to say, Here’s your level and, for someone in your age range, your weight should be around this level. Here’s what we need to do to get you there. So, he’s been pretty patient.”

 As with anything, Lisa adds, patience is an important part of the process. “It’s a trial; everybody is different. People have to give themselves time with the therapy to see how their body is going to react. If the blueprint was the same for everybody, there would be no HRC Medical Center Tampa.”

Inflammation reduced naturally

The bottom line, according to Dr. Carrozzella, is that bio-identical hormones are exactly the same as the natural hormones produced by the body. “When we take a bio-identical hormone, the body says, Yup, I recognize that and knows exactly what to do with it, using it the way it’s supposed to be used. And when the body is done, it breaks up the substance and discards it.”

In Lisa’s case, he adds, the positive aspects were even stronger. “She had other physiological issues, like rheumatoid arthritis, and RA is an expression of an inflammatory process in the body,” the doctor explains. “Testosterone is a natural anti-inflammatory and hormone balance, in itself, works to neutralize inflammation. Lisa was stabilized on her hormones and she has gotten to the point where she no longer has to take her RA medications.”

Bio-identical hormone therapy also eliminated the need for treatment as drastic as a hysterectomy in Lisa’s case, Dr. Carrozzella notes. “With her hot flashes and bad periods, she had an endometrial ablation that didn’t work, and the next recommendation was a hysterectomy, which she didn’t want to have.

“She’s a prime example of an estrogen and progesterone mismatch. Lisa is in that age range when the progesterone is declining faster than the estrogen, so that leads to very irregular, very uncomfortable periods. When you work to reorient that estrogen-progesterone balance as we did with her, you then allow those two hormones to work together and often significantly improve those PMS-type symptoms, which are much more common as we age. That’s another big thing we see in women, and it turned out to be quite a success story with Lisa.”

Clearly, at any age, the effects of hormonal imbalance can be dramatic and life-altering. “The real physiological explanation is that hormonal imbalance causes the cells not be able to respond to environmental trauma, not to be able to repair themselves, and as the hormones diminish, the cells are less able to care for themselves,” says Dr. Carrozzella.

As a result, any number of conditions can occur. “Hormone imbalance is frequently misdiagnosed as depression,” the doctor notes. “When hormones start to get out of whack, patients can experience mental clarity issues. A lot of women say they feel like they’re in a fog, or they don’t feel clear or alert.”

Fortunately, he stresses, there’s an answer. “It’s really quite the reverse of what we’ve always been led to think – that you just get old and things start to fail. It may very well be the other way around. Where we have learned to modify and retard the hormonal declines, we can also preserve or reduce the rate of aging.”

Amor Vie difference

“Today, people not only want to live longer, they also want to live healthier,” observes Michael Montemurro, president of HRC Medical Center Tampa. “We know that, as we age, hormonal deficiencies can cause a multitude of symptoms, which can decrease our quality of life. Therefore, our mantra at HRC Medical Center is: Get your life back!”

Both Mike and Dr. Carrozzella can personally attest to the benefits of BHRT, and say having balanced hormones comes with many long-term benefits. As men and women age, they tend to develop hormone deficiencies.

“As women emerge from menopause, there is a dramatic increase in the chance of sudden death from cardiac disease,” explains Dr. Carrozzella. “Yet, numerous studies show that women with optimum hormone levels do not see that increase in cardiac mortality rates. Same thing with men – when their testosterone is balanced, the risk of sudden death from cardiac disease drops dramatically.”

According to Mike, the center uses an exclusive type of BHRT called Amor Vie.

“Based on each patient’s individual symptoms and blood work, we customize a bio-identical hormone replacement therapy for them in pellet form,” he says. “Our bio-identical hormone pellets are derived from wild yam plants, a natural plant material, which is then molecularly changed in structure and function to match what is produced by the human body.”

With the Amor Vie therapy, patients can achieve consistent absorption of the proper, predictable levels of hormones their bodies require for optimum health through the simple insertion of a pellet approximately once every three to five months.

“These pellets are designed specifically for HRC Medical Centers,” he continues. “We have an exclusivity on them, which is important because their compression and dissolution has been tested over a significant period of time. With our pellets, your hormone levels are always in balance and optimized.”

Mike reminds that prior to the famous WHI (Women’s Health Initiative) studies, which concluded that synthetic hormones, as opposed to bio-identical hormones, had risks that outweighed the benefits, many women were receiving hormone replacement therapy.

“Pellet therapy has been used safely in the United States since 1939,” educates Mike. “In a study done of close to a thousand female patients who have had the pellet insertions, no one developed breast or ovarian cancer secondary to the hormones.”

He adds that patients are also pleased to learn that the pellets are sterilized according to FDA standards, so as they dissolve into the body, they maintain that sterilization.

“We use pure testosterone, pure estradiol, and pure progesterone, matching bio-identically ninety-eight to one hundred percent to the hormones our own body produces in our Amor Vie procedure,” says Mike, “whereas the synthetic hormones used in medications like Premarin can be as little as six to eight percent bio-identical.”

He emphasizes that, unlike with some other health care providers, the main focus of HRC Medical Center – the only focus – is BHRT pellet therapy.

“We offer a very upbeat and fun environment because we are a totally health-oriented center, and our Amor Vie is absolutely life-changing,” Mike says.