Hormone Therapy Now Linked To Ovarian Cancer
Hot on the heels of an earlier blog which reported that postmenopausal women who take a combination of estrogen and progestin therapy face a greater risk for developing a more advanced form of breast cancer and an increased risk of death comes news that a new European study reports that women on post-menopausal hormone therapy had a 29 per cent greater risk of ovarian cancer, compared with those that did not use hormones.
Investigators led by Konstantinos Tsilidis, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Oxford in England, and funded by The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), tracked data on 126,920 postmenopausal women who did not have a history of cancer and did not have their ovaries removed. After nine years of follow-up, 424 ovarian cancers had been diagnosed.
Hormone therapy in the form of estrogen alone or in combination with progestin has been linked with many forms of cancer. It is important to note that when deciding whether to use hormone therapy, the American Cancer Society advises women to consider the following factors: (1) The risk of breast, endometrial, ovarian and lung cancer; (2) The risk of other serious conditions affected by HRT . . . . like heart disease, stroke, and serious blood clots (DVT or deep vein thrombosis); and (3) Other medicines that may be used to treat menopausal symptoms or osteoporosis.
