Vaginal Atrophy: What It Is and What You Can Do About It

Take back your sex life with a new FDA-approved laser treatment

From the LifeMinute Team

March 13, 2015

Vaginal atrophy...it's as uncomfortable as it sounds. And up until now, women suffering from the very common condition -- primarily postmenopausal women and breast cancer survivors -- had very little hope for improvement. But the recent FDA approval of the MonaLisa Touch, an Italian-built laser device, is empowering women to take back control of their vaginal health through a new groundbreaking treatment.

Dr. Mickey Karram explains, "I truly would categorize this as a game-changing treatment for a very common condition that we call in medical circles Vaginal Atrophy. Atrophy is basically a problem that occurs when a woman loses her circulating estrogen. The most common reason for that would be when a woman passes through menopause, her ovaries stop working, her estrogen levels drop, and in a matter of one to three or four years, the vagina basically dries up."

And with that comes symptoms like dryness, irritation, lower urinary tract issues and pain with intercourse. "The MonaLisa Touch is a minimally invasive revolutionary laser treatment that is delivered in an office setting, in a matter of minutes, that really addresses these symptoms quite well," says Dr. Karram, "This problem impacts millions of postmenopausal women. And also unfortunately, most breast cancer survivors have this problem because either they can't take estrogen because their tumor is estrogen-dependent, or they're placed on a medicine that antagonizes the estrogen in their body, or they're simply fearful of estrogen because of all the unknowns and how it impacts breast cancer."

Dr. Karram is the first clinician to utilize the treatment in the United States, and Lisa Elliott, a breast cancer survivor who had a severe form of vaginal atrophy and participant in Dr. Karram's research trial, is one of his success stories.

Lisa tells us, "When I was 29, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Since that time I've been on Tamoxifen, which has since caused postmenopause-like symptoms, including vaginal atrophy. And with that, my sex life ended. There was no way that I could have sex at all; it was excruciatingly painful. And when you're 30 years old, that seems really daunting to live the rest of your life that way. I'm a little bit stubborn, though, so I wasn't going to accept 'no' for an answer, or 'there's no treatment' for an answer."

It was then that Lisa discovered the MonaLisa Touch treatment and became a part of Dr. Karram's clinical trial. "It has had such success for me," says Lisa, "I started noticing change within two days of my first treatment, and since that time it has just gotten progressively better. I am over the moon excited with how well this has worked. And I don't have to worry about the safety of it. I don't have to worry because there's no hormones, and...I'm one of those people that can't have hormones, so this has been really important for me and for my life, not only my physical well-being but my emotional well-being."

Lisa's advice to women suffering from vaginal atrophy symptoms who might not know that they have options? "I would say that you are not alone. You are in a club of millions of other women," says Lisa, "And most of those women are silent about it; they feel that this is just part of the natural process and they just have to live with this. And that is not true. You have to be your own advocate. You have to really look for the treatment options and find a doctor who's willing to work with you."

"This is a problem that impacts so many women, but there's so much misperception about it," adds Dr. Karram, "Women, unfortunately, have very little knowledge or education about this. And they just assume that it's the normal part of aging and that these are just symptoms that they have to live with. And they assume that the only therapy out there is hormones -- and either they don't want to take them, or they've tried them and they don't work. ... It's really important to get this problem out of the closet and let women like Lisa who have cancer, or patients who just go through menopause, stop suffering in silence and start to hopefully gain back some of their quality of life."

Over 50 sites in the U.S. are now offering the MonaLisa Touch treatment. To find out where and get more information, visit SmileMonaLisa.com.

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