Fallout from hormone study

Denny Henry / for msnbc.com

Ingrid Gorman, a 48-year-old senior vice president at Discovery Communications, said she never discussed menopause with her mother, but wants to now that she's approaching that age. "I don't even remember discussing menstruation with her when I was little," she said.

By Maggie Fox

When her aunt died of breast cancer, Mari-Anne Pisarri had no doubts about what caused it. She was certain it was estrogen pills. So when the Womens Health Initiative released their findings, I thought, Well, of course, Aunt Betty could have told them that years ago, said Pisarri, a 56-year-old partner at a Washington, D.C. law firm.

Pisarri is one of tens of millions of U.S women who have no intention of taking hormone replacement therapy to ease the symptoms of menopause. I am just not willing to take the risk, she said.

Like so many women in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, Pisarris aunt got estrogen as a matter of course when she entered menopause. Doctors routinely prescribed hormones in the belief that HRT prevented heart disease, cancer and the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis.

The federal government decided to check out these assumptions, and commissioned the Womens Health Initiative a giant study of 161,000 women. In 2002, regulators stopped the study when it became startlingly clear that HRT did not lower the risk of heart disease or cancer in the women taking part in the study. In fact, it raised the risk of stroke, heart attacks and breast cancer, they reported in a paper published 10 years ago Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Women stopped taking the pills in droves. While as many as 17 million women used HRT in 2001, by 2009 just about 8 million did. A decade after the Womens Health Initiative report was released, women are still confused and so are many doctors.

It would be impossible to say for sure that Pisarris aunt got cancer because she took HRT. But the giant drug company Pfizer said last month it has paid $896 million so far to settle lawsuits alleging the pills made women sick without warning them of the risks. Pfizer owns Wyeth, the company that made the most popular HRT drugs Premarin and Prempro.

Swinging pendulumDr. JoAnn Manson, a professor at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston who helped conduct the study, says people overreacted to its findings. The pendulum has swung from hormone therapy is good for all women to hormone therapy is bad for all women after the Womens Health Initiative, Manson said in a telephone interview. What the WHI showed us is that hormone therapy is appropriate for some, but not all, women.

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Fallout from hormone study