There’s been a lot of hubub about the safety of HRT, or hormone replacement therapy, which was touted as a great way to counteract the effects of menopause in pre-menopausal and menopausal women, usually in their fifties or late forties.  However, HRT has been largely stopped unless it is being taken for specific medical reasons, because of a government backed study that found it significantly increased  heart disease risks. 

It was also thought to increase the risk of certain types of cancer in women, but that thought was that it only increased the risk while the woman was actually taking the HRT treatments, and disappeared pretty much after she was off of them.  However, there’s been good news mixed with bad. 

The good news is, the heart risks associated with HRT disappeared after they went off HRT, but there are still lingering cancer risks years later, and ongoing studies are finding that women are getting cancerous tumors on their lungs and breasts, and also may have a higher risk of other types of cancer, significant enough to warrant concern for women who were on HRT at some point in their life and are now off of it. 

The problem is, researchers cannot figure out what the specific factors are in the HRT treatments that increase cancer so significantly.  They are also thinking that the fairly recent decline in breast cancer in women has been at least partly due to the fact that HRT has largely been halted due to safety concerns. 

Of course that makers of one popular HRT drug have refuted or at least challenged the study’s findings, saying that they were done on women in their sixties, which is not the typical demographic for HRT users, and that women in their sixties logically will have more health issues than younger women in the late forties and fifties would have. 

While researchers say that increased awareness is needed, they do not want to cause alarm, but do want women who have been on HRT to take a bit more precaution when it comes to preventive cancer care and screening. 

This entry was posted on March 15, 2008 at 10:31 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Breast Cancer Prevention by Breast News Girl No Comments Yet