Healthy Skepticism Library item: 9290

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Publication type: news

Goldstein J.
Hormones for Menopause Get Reprieve
Wall Street Journal Health Blog 2007 Apr 4
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2007/04/04/hormones-for-menopause-get-reprieve/

Full text:

In a surprising twist, replacement hormones prescribed to ease the symptoms of menopause don’t raise the risk of heart disease for women in their 50s, according to a new analysis of the Women’s Health Initiative, the massive, government-funded research project that has produced some of the most parsed and fretted over data of the past decade. The hormone replacements also appear to reduce the overall risk of death for women in that age group.

Use of hormone replacement therapy, plunged five years ago, after a WHI study was stopped because women taking Prempro, Wyeth’s combination of estrogens and a progestin, had more heart attacks than women not taking the drug. Two years later, a WHI study of estrogen alone was also halted, because the drug seemed to raise the risk of stroke.

But some critics had suggested that those studies, which included large numbers of women in their 60s and 70s, might not be relevant for women in their 40s and 50s. The new analysis, published in JAMA, “is especially important because it most closely measures effects on the typical hormone user: a recently menopausal woman…who seeks relief for hot flashes and other symptoms,” Tara Parker-Pope writes in today’s Journal.

“I understand some people are going to say we’ve reversed course,” the study’s lead author told Parker-Pope. “The data are the data. We’re saying the same things. We just have more detail.”