• Posted April 27, 2026

Estrogen Patch Shortages Likely Driven By Empowered Women Seeking Relief, Expert Says

A new generation of empowered women could be driving the estrogen patch shortages now bedeviling the United States, the medical director of The Menopause Society told HealthDay TV.

“I think it's that women and clinicians and people in general are talking about menopause much more so now than in the past, which is a good thing,” said Dr. Stephanie Faubion, who is also director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Women’s Health.

“This is a different generation than the baby boomers who really didn't talk about things like menopause in public,” she said. “The Gen Xers and the first of the millennials are now in the age range where they would start to experience symptoms, and hearing that there's nothing that can be done for their symptoms is not acceptable to this generation and you got to love it.

“So, they're not only asking for answers, they're crowdsourcing answers and using social media to do so,” Faubion said. “They're educated. A lot of them have money and their own jobs and they have a need that has not been fulfilled. That vacuum has created an industry around menopause now, which did not exist before.”

More than 1 million women in the U.S. enter menopause every year, and many seek help for symptoms like hot flashes, mood changes and sleep problems, HealthDay has reported.

Interest in hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has grown in recent years, especially since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) updated its messaging last year.

In November, FDA removed a long-standing black-box safety warning on these therapies, Reuters reported.

By the end of February, use of estrogen patches jumped 26%, according to data from Truveta, a health analytics company.

Since 2023, estrogen patch use has increased 184%, while use of vaginal creams rose 122%.

Demand in the U.S. for menopause hormone therapy plummeted in the early 2000s, after a large-scale study linked it to an increased risk of heart disease and breast cancer, Faubion said.

But in the subsequent years, re-analysis of the data revealed that “for those women in their 50s, hormone therapy was actually pretty safe,” Faubion said. “And for those women, the risk of heart attack and stroke is quite rare anyway, because these are younger women.”

Overall, hormone therapy use remained under 2% in the U.S., as of 2023, Faubion said.

“We don’t have data over the last year, two years to say there’s been an uptick, but it appears to be the case,” she said.

Despite this increased interest, there are still some women whose health history will impact the type of hormone therapy they get, or if they should get it at all, Faubion said.

“If you're younger than 60 or within 10 years of menopause onset and having bothersome symptoms like hot flashes, night sweats, sleep disturbances, mood disturbances … that would be the woman that we would want to talk about,” she said.

However, doctors also will look at a woman’s health history for signs of heart disease or breast cancer before prescribing hormone therapy, Faubion said.

“If you have, for example, diabetes or high blood pressure, it doesn't mean that you're not a candidate for hormone therapy, but it might affect the type of hormone therapy and the route of delivery that we give to you,” she said.

In the meantime, doctors are figuring out ways to get women the help they need despite estrogen patch shortages, Faubion said.

“Usually if we rewrite the prescription, if they couldn't get the once-a-week patch, we do the twice-a-week patch or we get to the dose in a different way by doing two lower dose patches together,” Faubion said. “So, usually we can cobble it together.”

More information

The Cleveland Clinic has more on estrogen patches.

SOURCE: HealthDay TV, April 27, 2026