Dr. Katharina Dalton is one of the many scientists and doctors who have discovered that progesterone in the natural form protects the fetus from miscarriage.
If a woman has had four or five miscarriages in the first six or eight weeks of a pregnancy, this is always due to luteal phase failure, says Dr. John Lee. Progesterone is needed to facilitate implantation and to prevent rejection of the developing embryo, but the follicle may not respond to the ovum with enough. Dr. Lee's recommendation: "Wait till you ovulate, and then four to six days after possible conception do a blood test ( for HCG) to see if you're pregnant. If you are, start the progesterone; that way you will increase you chance of having a healthy baby." Blood tests for pregnancy tend to be positive within seventy-two hours of conception, whereas he says urine pregnancy tests are not usually positive until two weeks after conception.
One of Dr. Lee's notable findings is that there is an immune-suppressing effect in the uterus from higher doses of progesterone. This is important, because when conception takes place, half of the baby's chromosomes are from the male and half of them from the female. That makes the baby's tissue DNA different from the mother's because of the contribution of the father. If there's not a good tissue match, the difference will create tissue rejection. If you try to do a skin graft or a kidney or heart transplant and the tissue isn't the same, the body will reject it. But this doesn’t happen with pregnancy. Why? Because of the progesterone response in the uterus. It's a site-selective action that doesn’t occur anywhere else in the body; therefore, the baby is not rejected. By giving more progesterone after conception, you thus increase the likelihood that the baby will survive.
Looking at the problem from another perspective, Dr. Lita Lee informs us that "after conception progesterone prevents miscarriages resulting from excess estrogen." It is interesting to note the consistency of the research, as in Dr. Peat's study, indication that "pregnancy toxemia and tendency to miscarry or deliver prematurely are often corrected by progesterone." Dr. Peat goes on to say, "My dissertation research, which established that an estrogen excess kills the embryo by suffocation, and that progesterone protects the embryo by promoting the delivery of both oxygen and glucose, didn't strike a responsive chord in the journals which are heavily influenced by funds from the drug industry."
It is a fact that if a pregnant woman produces too much estrogen, her embryo can be suffocated (hypoxia). Dr. Lita Lee cautions that during the ninth week of pregnancy, a woman can lose her baby if she is a "high estrogen producer and/or [is] consuming commercial meat, poultry and dairy products containing synthetic estrogen (DES)." However, she goes on to say that natural progesterone "has been known to protect against the toxic effects of excess estrogen, including abortion." Make certain, if hormones are prescribed during pregnancy, that they are not the synthetic progestins or estrogens but the natural micronized products. We now know that artificial hormones can be dangerous to the fetus during pregnancy.
Dr. John Lee stresses that synthetic compounds cannot be efficiently "excreted by one’s usual enzymatic mechanisms. Despite their advertisements, synthetic hormones are not equivalent to natural hormones." Side effect can include fatigue, elevation of cholesterol, heart palpitations, headaches, depression, emotional disorders, weight gain, bloating, and more.
From all the data it seems clear that natural progesterone therapy offers no risks to the patient and will be likely to benefit those wishing to conceive. Additional reports indicate that without progesterone treatment, women with luteal phase defect are at very high risk for spontaneous abortion. Progesterone has been found to be important in maintaining a pregnancy during the early months.
