Women Health and Environment

Research on two continents has signaled more bad news for hormone replacement therapy, taken for at least five years, may make ovarian cancer more likely offering the strongest evidence yet that the drugs can raise the risk of breast cancer and are tied to a slightly higher risk of ovarian cancer. But doctors stressed that younger women who need the drugs to relieve serious symptoms of menopause should still consider taking them because new, lower-dose formulations are available and doctors now know to prescribe them for shorter periods of time.

The finding comes from Valerie Beral, M.D., and colleagues with the U.K. Million Women Study. They invited more than a million women living in Britain to take part in the study, starting in 1996. Dr Valerie Beral and colleagues at the Cancer Research UK Epidemiology Unit in Oxford, said their findings suggested that that as many as 1,000 extra women in Britain had died from ovarian cancer between 1991 and 2005 because they were using hormone replacement therapy.
Based on those findings, the researchers write that “since 1991, use of HRT has resulted in some 1,300 additional ovarian cancers and 1,000 additional deaths from the malignancy in the U.K.” However, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine notes that short-term HRT use probably isn’t harmful for women using HRT to ease menopause symptoms.

“The effect of HRT on ovarian cancer should not be viewed in isolation, especially since use of HRT also affects the risk of breast and endometrial cancer,” Dr Beral’s team wrote. “The total incidence of these three cancers in the study population is 63 percent higher in current users of HRT than never users,” they added. “Thus when ovarian, endometrial and breast cancer are taken together, use of HRT results in a material increase in these common cancers.”

Stopping hormone use may have stopped some cancers from growing and caused them to disappear, scientists speculate. Or it may have just slowed them down so that they will not appear until years later, said Ahmedin Jemal, a researcher with the American Cancer Society. Only time will tell which is true, he said.

Labels: breast cancer, cancer, healthy, hormone, hrt, medical