The two news studies are offshoots of the Women’s Health Initiative Memory Study (WHIMS), which found an increased risk of dementia in women on hormone therapy. WHIMS is a parallel study to the Women’s Health Initiative, the landmark clinical trial, which in 2002 found that hormone therapy was hurting some women more than it helped them.
The WHIMS researchers had suspected that the women on hormone therapy would have blood vessel disease in the brain, which can destroy brain tissue by restricting blood flow to cells, leading to mental impairment and resulting in vascular dementia. To investigate, two WHIMS teams examined brain MRI scans from 1,403 women participating in the study.
“Much to our surprise,” something else was going on,” says Susan M. Resnick, PhD, of the National Institute on Aging’s Intramural Research Program, who led one of the studies. Two memory-related brain regions, the frontal lobes and the hippocampus, were slightly but definitely smaller among women taking hormones. “These negative effects were really most evident in women who seemed to already be having some low cognitive function and possibly some memory problems,” Resnick says.
Among the women with the smallest amount of vascular damage in their brains, she adds, hormone therapy had no effect on the volume of these brain regions.
The degree of atrophy suggests a small but real increase in the dementia risk, according to Resnick. Starting hormone therapy likely accelerated the disease process in already-vulnerable women, she explains.
In the second study, Laura H. Coker, PhD, of Wake Forest University Health Sciences, in Winston-Salem, N.C., and colleagues, found that women taking estrogen and progestin had slightly larger areas of vascular damage in their brains than those on placebo, but the difference wasn’t significant, making it clear that vascular disease wasn’t behind the women’s increased dementia risk.
“When this type of hormone therapy is initiated, you get volume loss in these key brain areas, and where there’s loss of volume, there’s loss of function,” says Maki.
Investigators are looking into other formulations of estrogen and progestin, as well as very low doses of the hormones, to see if they might be safer than the formulation and relatively higher dose taken by participants in the Women’s Health Study.
In the 1990s, more than half of menopausal women said they had taken hormones at some point, and one-third took them for at least five years. About 38% of women ages 50 to 70 were taking hormones, according to surveys at the time.
Prescriptions for the two most commonly prescribed hormone products, Premarin and Prempro, dropped from 61 million prescriptions in 2001 to 21 million in 2004, according to the National Cancer Institute.
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Comments (12)
I think you should emphasize that this study was done with hormones obtained from pregnant horse urine and they are not human hormones. Your article is misleading and dangerous.
Bio-identical hormones DO NOT have the adverse effects that synthetic hormones have. Natural bio-identical hormones are healthier and should be your choice over drug companies’ synthetic garbage that is actually dangerous. The animal cruelty involved with Premarin is inconceivable. The horses are killed and live horrible lives until they are.
Why there is so much fad of taking drug in western society?Why pharmaceutical firms are florrishing in western countries?
There are two reason, first unhealthly life style, and fear of disease [which is systmematically spread by scientists and phrma firms]
If you keep your lifestyle healthy I donot think you require these hormons,Bcomplex or any other drug.
Aruveda Indian medical system based upon healthy lifestyle.
One of great SAGA tell four rule for healthy lifestyle.
[1] Reduce your food half.[2]Double your drinking water.[3] triple your physical and mental exercises.[4] Increase laugh[ pure Joy]fourtime.
Your comments are right on. Horse urine should never have made it into our womens bodies, nothing good has ever come of it. Yet, Bioidentical hormones return women to their youthful vitality without the risk of cancer. This my friend is a no brainer.
PMU mare farms are the equine worlds equivalent to the jewish concentration camps. PMU Mares are kept in barns with stalls so tight they cannot move, with urine collection devices permanently attached that look like torture devices.
The mares are kept pregnant in order to continually produce (horse) hormones that are extracted and put into womens hormone replacements.
The baby foals are taken from the mother and sent to slaughter houses in Mexico and Canada. The mares never have a chance at normal foal bonding and raising, never have a chance to interact normally with other horses and their bodies rapidly break down due to lack of normal movement or from infections from the urine collection devices. Once the mare breaks down she is sent to a slaughter house. A horrible existence and ending for an intelligent, sensitive animal.
There are thousands of these farms in North America. This is the hidden shame of the pharmaceutical industry. Stop supporting PMU harvesting.
Whole western civilization is based on fear, all are taking advantage of this weakness of western people.Doctors and Pharm companies are frist runners in this field.
I donot think any society is so prone to medicine.Why medical treatment is costly in U.S.?
You do your readers a grave disservice by publishing this misleading information. Hormone supplementation has broad benefits when done with bio identical hormones rather than foreign substances that should never have been used in the first. This in out of the dark ages. Shame on you!
I would like information about bio-identical hormone replacement. Which or where would I be able to find such web based information? My primary care doctor will not provide the information. All she says is you do not want to go off of Premarin. OH YES I do…. I am also looking for a new doctor. Thank you
In august 19, 2006,I had a hysterectomy done do to uteral and cervical cancer ever since then.I have had a hard time trying to find replacement hormones as well as everything needed. My hot flashes have been getting worse and,I cannot get sleep and my sexual life also has changed so can some one help me.
well i think hat if thgere is treament then go for it *because everything is a risk in life *so why not try* but if a natural thing is out there hay go for it
I started taking bio-identical hormones 10 months ago. They are so much better than the hormones pushed by the drug companies. By the way, I did take the other hormones for 9 years after a hysterectomy. I certainly don’t believe anything in this article and my Dr. would disagree too. I have learned to believe very little of anything that drug companies or other small studies would have us believe.
Can anyone tell me what one can do to oppose the abuse of these poor horses used to produce estrogen. There surely has to be some legal way to put them out of business.