Two years ago, a landmark study called the Women's Health Initiative found that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was not the wonder drug that the pharmaceutical industry and many doctors made it out to be. The drug was found to increase the risk of not only breast cancer but also heart disease (The latter finding was particularly troubling because HRT makers had been touting for years how the drug protected women from this condition). When these health risks began to emerge during the multi-year study, researchers told the study participants who were taking HRT to stop their treatment. And that ended the HRT portion of the study.
But not quite. Researchers then realized that by telling women to stop taking HRT, they would be able to ask a new research question: when women went off HRT, would their menopause symptoms return or not? It turns out that they did return. Rather than eliminating menopausal symptoms in these women, HRT just delayed them. As Dr. Judith Ockene, lead investigator of the study stated, "You can't necessarily expect to just skip that stage."
These findings reinforce the notion that menopause is not so much a disease--as makers of HRT often want women to believe--but rather a normal process of aging that all women go through and perhaps need to go through. After all, menopausal symptoms are signs that the body is trying to adjust to its lower hormone levels.
To see the full study, which was published in this week's issue of the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), click here.
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