Saturday, December 16, 2006

This from Dr. Peter Ravdin of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center on newly released data that showed a decreased incidence of breast cancer within one year of the termination of the Women's Health Initiative hormone therapy study:

What we think is going on is that about half of the cancers that were just below the detection range in 2002 in women who were taking hormone replacement therapy actually stopped growing or regressed when they stopped [HRT].

1 comment:

framboise.surmeno said...

That's great on the surface of it, and I'm sure that some of those women have gotten along just fine without hrt. But for those who haven't, we're no further removed from the old question of weighing risks and benefits. What I see the press this has gotten as doing is once again enabling knee-jerk withdrawal of prescriptions for hrt, without considering or even consulting the woman about her needs and health goals. And for the women in surgical meno, whose goals tend to be more those of using hrt to emulate the hormone support of functional menopausal ovaries without hrt (that is, that lowered risk profile), we're going to end up having to scramble, again, for credibility as a separate group with distinctive needs. Interesting how this is getting so much more press than the 70% all-cause mortality increase for oophorectomized women who didn't take hrt, isn't it? *sigh*