There’s been a lot of negative publicity as of late on HRT, or medical Hormone Replacement Therapy, which is a therapy used in menopausal women who need to balance their hormones.  It basically means that these women are given doses of estrogen and estrogen-like compounds that helps to raise their natural levels of the hormone at this time of life when women’s estrogen tends to take a steep decline, and this leads to menopause symptoms like hot flashes, irratibility and abnormal hair growth, to name a few.

Well, the downside to this HRT was that there were problems associated with the therapy, including possible links to an increased risk of breast cancer, as well as possible increases of risk of heart problems.  This news caused quite an uproar in the medical community, and had many doctors taking their female menopause patients off of HRT to be prudent about the health risks.  This also caused a bevy of herbal remedies for HRT to claim they could safely help in the menopause symptoms department (which I tend to advocate more than taking large doses of estrogen from the medical version). 

Well, now a combination HRT treatment is claiming that it may help reduce the risk of breast cancer in the women that take it.  The swedish report says that women who take the combination HRT treatment who do develop breast cancer have tumors that are much more treatable and tend to be benign more than the women who have straight-estrogen type HRT.

The results are somewhat confusing though if you ask me, because some of the women who were in the research study had a previous history of family history of breast cancer, and also because how do we know that these tumors are not genetically linked, rather than onset by HRT? 

Also, the results were not clear to me, because the study did not indicate whether these numbers represented a statistically significant portion of women who had taken HRT, and so it wasn’t clear whether these numbers of women who had undergone HRT had a staggering occurrence of breast cancer to begin with.  My vote would be still to stay away from HRT…..just my personal opinion.

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Posted in Breast Health by Breast News Girl No Comments Yet