Word: progestin
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Aging is never easy, particularly during menopause. But for 30 years women could at least depend on estrogen and progestin supplements, a comforting hormonal hand to hold that would not only ease the uncomfortable symptoms of getting older but also keep skin supple and hair lustrous. Doctors even encouraged women well into their 70s to take the treatments, on the basis of studies showing that they protected against heart disease and cushioned bones against osteoporosis-related fractures...
...same, unfortunately, doesn't hold true for older women. Estrogen and progestin have a habit of aggravating the hard, artery-clogging plaques that develop naturally with age. On the basis of animal studies and other heart-disease trials in human patients, the authors suspect that hormone therapy encourages the clots that form around these plaques to rupture and cause heart attacks. Nonetheless, the latest study offers a backward sort of good news, suggesting that intense menopausal symptoms may be a kind of early warning system, since women who suffer the most also tend to harbor more risk factors for heart...
Jessica S. Benjamin ’07 pointed out that estrogen and progestin medications are commonly used for treatments other than birth control...
...many ways, the story began four years ago when researchers halted a different part of the WHI--one that looked at the long-term health effects of taking the hormone combination estrogen and progestin (Prempro)--because of an increased risk of breast cancer and heart disease. (Women with a uterus who want to try hormone therapy must take both hormones because estrogen alone increases the risk of uterine cancer.) Two years later, the estrogen-only (Premarin) part of the trial, which focused on nearly 11,000 postmenopausal women who had undergone a hysterectomy, was stopped because of a slightly greater...
...cause and effect. That's not necessarily a problem. No one has ever done a randomized trial of smoking, yet it clearly causes cancer. On the other hand, it was on the basis of good epidemiological evidence that doctors believed for years that long-term use of estrogen and progestin would significantly protect women from heart disease. When the theory was put to the test with a randomized, controlled trial, however, it turned out to be dead wrong...