It was wonderful to hear just before Christmas 2006 that breast cancer rates have dropped significantly in post-menopausal women, and that this appears to be linked to the dramatic drop in the use of HRT from 2002. New evidence reveals that where researchers had expected to see around 200,000 new cases of breast cancer, there were in fact 14,000 fewer cases in the US in 2003, a 7 percent drop in incidence. There was a slightly lower 6 percent drop in breast cancer rates in New Zealand and Canada for the same period. As an explanation of how this could have occurred so soon after stopping HRT, the study’s lead author, Professor Donald Berry says that although breast cancer takes a long time to develop, “here we are primarily talking about existing cancers that are fuelled by hormones and that slow or stop their growing when a source of fuel is cut”.
But it is heartbreaking to think that hundreds of thousands (millions?) of women may have suffered avoidable breast cancer over the 4 decades that HRT was routinely prescribed for women at menopause. How many more tragedies on this scale are needed to change medical mindset and practice? What has been learned from a global blunder that saw drugs prescribed on a massive scale without evidence from long term trials. Instead women are offered alternative drugs such as anti-depressants and bisphosphonates.
New evidence around the dangers of combining estrogen with testosterone has also come to light. A 24-year Harvard study found that women who take a combination of estrogen and testosterone to relieve the symptoms of menopause dramatically increase their risk of getting breast cancer to more than double (2.5 times) the risk of women who use no hormones.
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