Posted 5:12 PM by Blah blah

Spider-Man Will Make You Gay. I'm feeling all lightheaded now!

Hormone Replacement Study a Shock to the Medical System (NY Times):

"The announcement yesterday that a hormone replacement regimen taken by six million American women did more harm than good was met with puzzlement and disbelief by women and their doctors across the country.

A rigorous study found that the drugs, a combination of estrogen and progestin, caused small increases in breast cancer, heart attacks, strokes and blood clots. Those risks outweighed the drugs' benefits a small decrease in hip fractures and a decrease in colorectal cancer. Many of the 16,000 women in the study, supported by the National Institutes of Health, opened letters yesterday telling them to stop the drugs. In light of the findings, the study had come to a halt....

Until recently, medical authorities were telling doctors to encourage almost every woman who had not had a hysterectomy to start taking the drugs when she reached menopause and to take them for years, even for life. Now the growing consensus seems to be that women should carefully consider whether they want to start the drugs at all. Those who take them for more than a few years should be aware of the risks, which, if slight, are real....

'This is the biggest bombshell that ever hit in my 30-something years in the menopause area,' Dr. Utian said.

It was a powerful scientific counterattack to years of strong promotion of hormone replacement. There were reams of scientific papers. Many fell short of absolute rigor, but in sum they pointed mostly in one direction, that of benefit. There were compelling marketing campaigns by drug companies. There was also the eager adoption of the drug combination by doctors and women who wanted to believe it worked.

The new study was different from the rest because it involved thousands of healthy women and had a control group, with half the women taking dummy pills. In addition, it looked for evidence of disease like heart attacks and cancer rather than indirect indicators like cholesterol levels, which can be misleading....

In the end, Wyeth began a randomized controlled study that most doctors and researchers assumed would prove estrogen's beneficial effects on the heart. The study, known as HERS, involved women who had already had heart disease, a group in whom effects should be easiest to find....

The emerging data from both that study, the Women's Health Initiative and HERS are sobering. HERS found that far from protecting women against heart attacks, the combination therapy actually increased their risk in the first few years of taking the drugs.

The Women's Health Initiative includes a group of women who have had hysterectomies and who are taking estrogen alone. That part of the study is continuing because the data have not shown significant risk or significant benefit from the hormone.

The other part of the study, of women taking the hormone combination, was the part that was halted. It found that if 10,000 women take the hormones for one year, eight more will develop invasive breast cancer than a similar group not taking the hormones, seven more will have heart attacks, eight more will have strokes and eight more will have blood clots in their lungs. The benefits are six fewer instances of colorectal cancers and five fewer hip fractures."