A new research provides supporting evidence to earlier studies that hormone therapy - taking doses of estrogen and/or progesterone - brings more health risk to menopausal women and should not be used to prevent other chronic diseases.
Dr. JoAnn Manson, lead author of the study from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and her colleagues studied earlier research data from around 30,000 women of menopausal age. They divided them into three groups based on the treatment: combined estrogen and progesterone therapy, estrogen only treatment, and placebo.
The trial period ran for six to seven years and ended 2002. The participants were followed through 2010 to see the effects of the treatment on other diseases particularly dementia, heart disease, stroke, and breast cancer among others.
The researchers found a higher risk of heart disease for women under hormone therapy but the risk to some extent has been reduced after the therapy. Estrogen users however have more risk of having a stroke but also reduced after the therapy has stopped.
Breast cancer risk was not reduced for the estrogen-progesterone group even after years of avoiding pills. Estrogen-only group, however, are less likely to be diagnosed with this disease than those from the placebo group.
Although the overall findings of the research team point out that the first two groups who underwent estrogen and progesterone intake did not do well in preventing and suppressing chronic diseases, the use of such therapy provided short-term benefits.
"The findings suggest that hormone therapy is a reasonable option for short-term treatment of menopausal symptoms in early menopause but should not be used for long-term chronic disease prevention," Manson told Reuters Health.
Treatment through hormone pills provides patients a "reasonable option for the management of moderate to severe menopausal symptoms among generally healthy women during early menopause."
The study was published in the Oct. 1 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
