RONI CARYN RABIN Published: Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 3:15 a.m. Last Modified: Sunday, November 14, 2010 at 5:20 a.m.
More bad news about post-menopausal hormone therapy: a new European study reports that women who take hormones are at significantly increased risk for ovarian cancer, which is rare but often fatal.
Findings from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition, which included some 126,920 post-menopausal women, were presented at a conference of the American Association for Cancer Research this week in Philadelphia.
After nine years of follow-up, 424 ovarian cancers had been diagnosed. Even after controlling for body mass index, smoking, and several other risk factors, researchers found that women taking post-menopausal hormone therapy had a 29 percent greater risk of ovarian cancer, compared with women who did not use hormones.
Women who used estrogen-only hormone therapy, typically taken after a hysterectomy, faced an increased risk of 63 percent compared with non-users, while the increased risk of ovarian cancer among women taking a combination of estrogen and progestin did not reach statistical significance.
Still, the study’s author, Konstantinos K. Tsilidis, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Oxford’s Cancer Epidemiology Unit in England, said there was a clear increase in risk for current users of all hormones, though only if they had been using hormones for at least five years.
“It’s important to get the message out to women,” Dr. Tsilidis said. “this is a very lethal cancer.”
The number of women taking hormone therapy plummeted after a large trial, financed by the National Institutes of Health, found that hormones increased the risks of stroke and blood clots, and that combination therapy also increased the risk of breast cancer and heart attacks. still, many women continue to use hormones to treat menopausal symptoms, though they are advised to take the lowest dose for as brief a period a time as possible.