Most people already know that hormone treatment after menopause can raise the risk for breast cancer. What many may not know is that researchers are now saying that it usually causes the cancer to be more advanced and deadly.
A recent study was performed on the most commonly prescribed hormone replacement pill called Prempro. It consists of estrogens from horse urine and a synthetic cousin of the hormone progesterone.
In the past few years women have been warned to scale down their hormone use, and these new findings seem to back up that advice. The article concerning this can be found in the October 18 week issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.
Dr. Rowan Chlebowski, an author and oncologist who treats breast cancer patients at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California, says that too many doctors believe that women can safely take hormones for menopause symptoms such as hot flashes for 4 or 5 years. He says that doctors should not think this anymore and patients should try to stop hormone therapy after a year or two. He also says it is still not known exactly how long these hormones can be taken without increasing one’s breast cancer risk.
The new findings come from a follow-up of 12,788 women who were part of the Women’s Health Initiative, a major federally financed study that compared women taking hormones with a group taking placebos.In 2002, 3 years ahead of schedule, the study was shut down because researchers discovered that hormones were creating small but notable increases in the risk of breast cancer, heart disease, strokes and blood clots in the lungs.
Six million American women had been on the hormone treatments, but the amount rapidly decreased to around half of that. The breast cancer rate also started to fall, so many researchers link the decrease with the reduction in hormone use. The researchers noticed small but substantial increases in harmful effects in women who were on the hormones. As the study had shown earlier, women taking hormones are more likely to acquire invasive breast cancer. Their rate of the disease was 0.43% per year, as compared with the placebo group, which was 0.34% per year.
In the group of women with breast cancer, the women who had taken hormones were more likely to develop cancerous lymph nodes, which is an ominous sign of a more advanced disease – 23.7% versus 16.2% in the placebo group.
There were also more women who had taken hormones that died from breast cancer – 0.03% per year, versus 0.01% in the placebo group. That comes down to 2.6 deaths per 10,000 women each year in the hormone taking group, which is two times as many as the 1.3 deaths per 10,000 in the placebo group.