Hormone therapy may be safer than once thought
Millions of menopausal women will be glad to hear that hormone replacement therapy, long considered too dangerous to be of any use, may be safe after all.
So if eating tofu and doing yoga aren’t cutting it for you in terms of menopause systems, you can relax a little bit. To be sure, the science here is far from clear-cut, which is part of why so many women are confused on the best practices for coping with the change. Hot flashes, vaginal dryness and osteoporosis are among the health problems that bedevil women of a certain age.
However, this new research shows that while all medical treatments carry risks, in this case they may well be worth the benefits provided when it comes to hormone replacement therapy. It may be safe for women, especially those who enter menopause early, to use hormone therapy for up to seven years, the Los Angeles Times reported.
A new randomized study of 27,347 women who were tracked for 18 years showed that those who took hormone medication were no more likely to die from any cause than women who were given a placebo. The Women’s Health Initiative hormone therapy trials tested the most common types of hormone therapy — estrogen alone and estrogen plus progestin — to analyze the benefits and risks of menopause hormone therapy, HuffPost has noted.
Researchers examined data from two trials, which included postmenopausal women with an average age of 63 at enrollment, and explored the effect of treatment over five to seven years, with 18 years of cumulative
follow-up. They focused on the effect of hormone therapy on mortality rates.
“Mortality rates are the ultimate ‘bottom line’ when assessing the net effect of a medication on serious and life-threatening health outcomes,” lead author JoAnn E. Manson, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a past president of the North American Menopause Society, told HuffPost.
Even better news is that researchers found deaths from Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia dropped more when taking an estrogen-alone medication than with a placebo during 18 years of follow-up.
Earlier studies linked hormone therapy with blood clots, stroke, cancer and other maladies. These dire findings turned many women off the idea of HRT for good. A 2002 Million Women Study in Britain, for instance, linked HRT with a higher risk of fatal breast cancer. There was also a 2003 study that implicated HRT with an increased risk of dementia. As a whole, these scary studies had a chilling effect on use of HRT, with usage dropping by half between 2002 and 2005.
But now many health experts are modifying their views and calling for more research.
“In this new analysis, we found that there was no association between hormone therapy and all cause mortality during either the treatment period or the long-term follow-up of these trials,” the HuffPost quoted Manson as saying.
Many doctors now endorse use of hormone therapy for recently menopausal women to manage hot flashes and other symptoms. Women and their doctors, they say, should be reassured that hormone therapy is a reasonable option for symptomatic women who are in early menopause but otherwise in good health.
University of Pittsburgh women’s health researcher Dr. Melissa McNeil, for one, called these findings “both compelling and reassuring,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
Particularly for women who enter menopause early, whose bones are at high risk of fracture, or who suffer menopauserelated hot flashes, night sweats and sleep disruption, “Hormone therapy appears to be both safe and efficacious,” McNeil said.