Weighing the Risks of Hormone Therapy

The post below originally ran on Huffington Post’s Healthy Living blog on February 19. To see the original post click here. For over a decade, hormone therapy (HT) has been a hot topic in medicine. Unfortunately, women are still confused and concerned about using HT after two federally-funded studies linked HT to potentially serious health risks. Even decades after these studies, information on HT is seriously muddied, and not much is still fully known or understood about the treatment. It’s time to clear up the confusion and debunk the false reports surrounding its risks. HT is used to primarily treat menopausal symptoms — hot flashes, night sweats, vaginal dryness, osteoporosis, among others. During menopause, a woman’s body stops producing estrogen and progesterone, HT replaces these two hormones. Often, these two hormones are used jointly, but women without a uterus are prescribed estrogen alone. Even though the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved many different therapies for HT and instructs physicians to prescribe these drugs at the lowest dose for the shortest time needed [1], many women and doctors are unable to shake off the alarming and potentially misleading concerns that have dominated the media regarding its use. In 1992, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), a 15-year set of studies of 161,808 women [2]. It was designed to investigate ways postmenopausal women might prevent...
Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Aging Women's Health Source Type: blogs