Dr. Joshua John-Ram Schacter argues that hormone replacement therapy can lower all-cause mortality and heart disease risk, and that the landmark Women's Health Initiative study used the wrong type of hormones. He says starting HRT when menopause symptoms begin may be safer than the study suggested.
Did show a decrease in all cause mortality. It did show a decrease in cardiac risk and in some of the arms it showed a decreased risk of breast cancer. The best case scenario is that we have a patient who starts hormone replacement therapy at the onset of menopause. So when we start to have symptoms, that's addressed and that requires awareness. I would like to say that. Let's get to the study, the more recent studies from Europe, but the WHI initiative was a real travesty. The percentage of women who may have had an increased risk of breast cancer didn't even reach statistical significance. It was also the arm of women who were on both non bioidentical synthetic estrogen and synthetic progesterone. And so that progestin may have caused more problems than we were aware. But importantly that study and as you know, the things that were never publicized did show a decrease in all cause mortality. It did show a decrease in cardiac risk and in some of the arms it showed a decreased risk of breast cancer.
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