I just want to compare notes, or see if anyone else has noticed this because I've never seen it referenced in either the menopause or autoimmune educational resources.

First my background: I've had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis from early childhood, some fair damage to a variety of joints, but as I got into my 20's it officially/technically went into "remission". But I still have pain and stiffness from the damage, am being treated for it with one of the maintenance biologics and over the counter naproxyn as needed for pain. Since I've had it my whole life, I know my body's patterns - when I'm stiff and painful, when it eases up, foods that intensify pain, etc. I manage it pretty well.

I'm 60 years old now and well into menopause. For the first few years in meno I didn't use any HRT because my meno symptoms were mild. Separately, I noticed that my RA pain/issues were nearly gone - partially due to an improved diet (avoiding food that causes inflammation, like sugar and alcohol). I felt GREAT!

Last year after a regular check up I noticed that my labwork showed that my estrogen and progesterone levels were super low (of course!) and my testosterone was pretty high. I didn't care about that so much but I'm trying to fight the aging process and worried that this would accelerate that, so I asked my doctor about HRT. She noted that HRT would be good also to help keep my bones strong, so she put me on progesterone pills and estrogen patches. I noticed fairly quickly that my bones started aching more than they had been. Not quite enough to tie that to the HRT but I did wonder.

I struggled with the twice a week patch replacement schedule and also didn't notice any improvement or other changes from it so for a few weeks I went without wearing the patches. Felt good again, but again didn't tie the two together. A few weeks ago new labwork showed that my estrogen was really low and my doc suggested I could safely double up the patches. I didn't tell her that I was being sloppy with them, but I started putting them on again, and for the last two weeks I've been doubling them.

And oh my god, have my bones been aching. And sometimes just on fire, with the Aleve not really helping much. Last night I was hurting so bad and realized that maybe there's a pattern here.... is the estrogen making my bones ache? I took off the patches and will go a few days without to see if I feel better, and then go back to just one patch and doing them as directed.

Has anybody else here with any autoimmune issues noticed that estrogen increases pain levels?