Word: estrogenous
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There was a sense of d?j? vu surrounding the announcement by the U.S.'s National Institutes of Health (NIH) in March that it had called a halt to a major study of the health effects of long-term estrogen use. Wasn't it already known that hormone-replacement therapy, when administered for more than a couple of years, was a bad idea...
...Well, yes and no. Two years ago, the NIH cut short the part of the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study that looked at the long-term use of a combination treatment including estrogen and progestin. Reason: women in the study were showing increased risk of heart disease, stroke and breast cancer. Last week's announcement concerns estrogen alone, which, it turns out, slightly increases a woman's risk of stroke but not of heart disease or breast cancer...
...difference between the two treatments is crucial because estrogen by itself is taken by a lot more women (a total of 5.6 million in the U.S. alone) than the estrogen-progestin combination (2 million U.S. women). Since estrogen in the absence of progestin increases a woman's risk of uterine cancer, it's given to women who have had a hysterectomy...
...higher stroke risk was comparable to what researchers had seen for the estrogen-progestin combo. Even at that, the increase was rather slight?about 8 additional strokes per 10,000 women. "Women should not feel this is some grand emergency for them," says Dr. Barbara Alving, director...
Even young women can experience SUI after childbirth, but the problem rarely becomes chronic until much later, often around menopause. The loss of estrogen weakens muscle walls, but that only partly explains the timing. "There are a lot of injuries that happen during childbirth that women learn to compensate for," says Dr. Peggy Norton, chief of urogynecology and pelvic reconstructive surgery at the University of Utah. As a woman grows older, Norton explains, her body's means of compensating for the damage may give way. Her muscles may weaken, her reflexes may not be so sharp, or maybe...