For nearly three decades the drug companies were convincing doctors that estrogen was the fountain of youth for women and that virtually all of them need to be on it. They sure convinced me. In fact in the mid '80s, shortly after finishing residency training, I was a paid speaker for the drug companies on the benefits of estrogen for osteoporosis. I reviewed the literature very carefully and could recite it backward and forward to "prove" that estrogen worked.
Well guess what? The proper studies had not yet been done. But those studies were eventually done and you would have to be sleeping under a rock to have missed the news two summers ago that estrogen should not be used in women because one of the largest and best-designed federal studies of hormone replacement therapy was halted because women taking the hormones after menopause had a greater risk of:
- Breast cancer
- Heart attack
- Stroke
- Blood clots
Now another arm of that same study was stopped for similar reasons. The study stopped in 2002 strongly implied that the problem was not estrogen but the synthetic progesterone (Provera) that they used. Now nearly two years later, it appears that Premarin alone, without Provera, will increase the risk of strokes. This is great news as nearly four years ago estrogen was shown to not provide protection against heart disease. Most current subscribers to the newsletter were not subscribing back then, but if they were they would have known far ahead of the crowd. But you probably know that already and is why you continue to read, so you can find out the details long before the rest of the world catches on.
Before I leave this topic though I do want to emphasize that estrogen is not intrinsically evil. Many women do need it. Specifically women who have had their ovaries removed or those that have hot flashes that interfere with their sleep that are unresponsive to more conservative care, like vitamin E or black cohosh.
Yahoo! News March 2, 2004