Hormones May Help Younger Women With Hot Flashes, Study Finds

There's more evidence that hormone therapy might not be so bad for women just starting menopause.

The latest Cochrane review supports the evidence that taking hormones does not lower the risk of heart disease for women past menopause. Cochrane reviews are meant to be authoritative, top-line recommendations

But the review of 19 different studies involving more than 40,000 women also shows that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) isn't especially dangerous for women, either.

"The take-home message is if you want to take hormones, you should be reassured," said Dr. Isaac Schiff, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Hormone replacement therapy used to be standard for women going through menopause. The idea was that giving women back the estrogen their bodies were no longer producing would protect them against heart disease, cancer and osteoporosis. Less importantly to doctors, it also relieved the hot flashes, sleeplessness and other life-altering symptoms of menopause.

"The take-home message is if you want to take hormones, you should be reassured."

Then a large study showed that in fact, HRT raised the risk of cancer, especially breast cancer and didn't lower the risk of heart disease. Almost overnight, women stopped taking it.

While as many as 17 million women used HRT in 2001, by 2009 just about 8 million did.

In the years since, doctors have realized that the story isn't so simple. They've found that younger women who are just entering menopause are not in as much danger of dangerous side effects as older women long past menopause. They've found that lower-dose HRT formulations may be safer. And new delivery methods, such as patches, may also avert some side-effects such as blood clots.

"This is a complicated health issue, where the same treatment offers benefits in some women, but harms in others," Dr. Henry Boardman of the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Oxford, who led the review team, said in a statement.

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Hormones May Help Younger Women With Hot Flashes, Study Finds