HRT Found to be Safer Among Younger Women

HRT: Found to be Safer among Younger Women

Scientists have determined that hormone replacement therapy using only estrogen does not provide overall protection against heart attacks, but a recent study has proven that there may be some benefit against heart disease in younger menopausal women.

The study was conducted at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and is the second study to suggest that hormone replacement therapy, or HRT, is safer in younger women whom are just entering menopause than it is in older women who are well past it.

The findings of this study were based on an analysis of part of the highly publicized 2002 study called the Women's Health Initiative, or WHI. The WHI study found that the HRT therapy in general raised the risk of heart attack, stroke, breast cancer and other serious conditions.

After the results of the WHI study came out, millions of women stopped HRT and sought alternatives. Prior to that, it had been promoted as a way of preventing heart disease.

The National Heart Lung and Blood Institute with Wyeth provided the drugs that funded the original WHI study.

The report published on February 13^th, in the Archives of Internal Medicine, looked at the part of the study, which involved estrogen only, as opposed to estrogen in combination with progestin.

This study concluded that estrogen "provided no overall protection against (heart attack) or coronary death in generally healthy post-menopausal women during a seven-year period of use."

However "there was a suggestion of lower coronary heart disease risk with (the drug) among women age 50 to 59" when the WHI study started, it said.

After the 2002 WHI study was made public, experts cautioned women to only take hormone replacement drugs in the lowest possible doses and for the shortest possible time. Sales of Wyeth's Premarin (estrogen only) and the company's other female hormone replacement drug, Prempro, (estrogen-progestin) fell dramatically.

Megan Mathews, Research and Content, March 7, 2006

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