U.S. researchers have stamped the Estrogen therapy as safe for women struggling with their menopausal symptoms as it helps to lower the risk of heart problems, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The Estrogen replacement therapy which was thought to increase the risk of breast cancer and heart attack in women (a finding by Women’s Health Initiative in 2002) is now found to lower the levels of dangerous calcium deposits by 40-60% in the coronary arteries of postmenopausal women. But the researchers have also advised women not to undergo the therapy for the sole reason of reducing heart problems as the Hormonal Replacement therapy HRT is not completely safe.
"There are other known risks" of estrogen therapy. It's unclear that the benefits would outweigh the risks" in women who aren't bothered by hot flashes.” they say.
"Hormone therapy should not be used for the express purpose of preventing cardiovascular disease due to other known risks, and it should be limited to treatment of menopausal symptoms at the lowest dose for the shortest duration necessary”, the lead researcher of the study, Manson, who is also co-author of Hot Flashes, Hormones and Your Health stressed.
The research conducted and led by JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, studied 1064 women aged 50-59 years (out of a set of more than 16000 postmenopausal women aged 50-79 years) that were assigned to hormone or sugar pills. The participants were randomly assigned to either 0.625 milligrams per day of Premarin or placebo which they took for an average of 7.4 years. All of them had their uterus removed surgically (hysterectomy) so they didn’t need to take progestin to protect the uterus against estrogen's cancer-causing effect.
After a follow up of 1.3 years, Computerized tomography (CT) was used to calculate the women's coronary-artery calcium score. The study assured that women taking estrogen had 30-40% less chances of having the calcium deposits as compared to those on placebos.
"These new results offer some reassurance to younger women who have had a hysterectomy and who would like to use hormone therapy on a short-term basis to ease menopausal symptoms," says Dr. Elizabeth G. Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health.
The Woman’s Health Initiative Trial, led by Manson in 2002 was the first attempt to find out a relationship between Estrogen benefits and risk of heart problems. WHI was a major 15-year research program to address the most common causes of death, disability and poor quality of life in postmenopausal women -- cardiovascular disease, cancer, and osteoporosis.
Launched in 1991, it involved 161,808 generally healthy postmenopausal women to conduct clinical trials to test the effects of postmenopausal hormone therapy, diet modification, and calcium and vitamin D supplements on heart disease, fractures, and breast and colorectal cancer.
The HRT had two studies, the estrogen-plus-progestin study of women with a uterus and the estrogen-alone study of women without a uterus.
It was stopped after about four years of treating women with Prempro, a combination of estrogen and progestin, when startling results of hormone replacement therapy raising the risk of blood clots, breast cancer and heart attacks were revealed. The researchers noted that participants of the study had crossed the age of 63 on an average.
A parallel study of Premarin published in another two years also showed higher risk of heart attacks with increasing age in women after five years of treatment. But the new study offers a better insight into questions of increased heart problems with age and time.
Estrogen is class of hormones that primarily influence the female reproductive system's development, maturation, and function. It is a substance that maintains the secondary sex characters and organs, such as mammary glands, uterus, vagina, and fallopian tubes, of mammalian females.
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