WDDTY
What Doctor’s Don’t Tell You

Drug companies have tried for nearly a decade to downplay the breast cancer risks of their HRT treatment and so keep sales up – but this week their lies and spin have been uncovered. Nine years ago, research discovered that the drugs caused breast cancer – and the drug companies countered that the cancers were not aggressive and were easily treatable.  Now the same researchers have discovered that the claim is not true – HRT causes advanced and life-threatening breast cancer.   In those nine years, doctors have continued to prescribe HRT to many thousands of women, who have been unnecessarily exposed to the risk of developing an aggressive……

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Read the complete article and related information at Drug companies lied to women about HRT risks for nine years

Top News U.S.

October 20, 2010
Amit Pathania

Women’s Health Initiative recently released new findings suggesting that Prempro hormone replacement therapy almost doubles the death risk from breast cancer.

A study conducted by the LA Biomedical Research Institute (LABRI) at harbor-UCLA Medical Center in 2002 found that the combination of estrogen and progesterone led to an increase in cases of breast cancer, making hormone replacement therapy generally a dangerous option for postmenopausal women. The study revealed that Prempro hormones, which were once used by millions of women, were in fact linked to higher rates of breast cancer and heart disease.

The initial findings in 2002 led to a decline in hormone use, with about 100,000 fewer invasive tumors detected from 2002-2007 than expected. The study continued to track 12,788 women for almost 8 years after the trials were stopped and found that for every 10,000 women, there were 2.6 deaths in those taking hormones and only 1.3 in those on a placebo.

These more recent findings conflict with previous studies showing that women with breast cancer who were taking hormones had a lower risk of death.

Peter Bach of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s health outcomes research group said: “Given the substantial population of women who seek relief from menopausal symptoms and the large potential burden of disease that could be created if medications given to alleviate symptoms today cause cancer and other deaths tomorrow, it seems that additional randomized trials are needed.”

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Read the complete article and related information at New Findings Show (HRT) Almost Doubles Breast Cancer Death Risk

Healthy Times Newspaper

October 7, 2010

By Lisa Lindley, M.D., FACOG

Let’s talk about hormone therapy. For years we thought hormones were the ruby slippers, the magic cure, and that everyone should be on them forever. Then in 2002, there was the WHI (Women’s Health Initiative) study. Publication of its data created a controversy over hormone therapy that continues today. There was a barrage of media coverage, filled with misinformation. Based on that, women and even many physicians decided that not only were hormones not the ruby slippers, they were poison apples. Women began throwing their hormones away, resigned to suffer the consequences. And suffer they did!

I heard many questions from my patients: “So what did this study say?” “What is the truth?” “What are the real risks and benefits of hormone therapy?” “Do hormones cause cancer?” “Are hormones right for me?”

My desire is not to have every woman taking hormones. My desire is that every woman becomes educated so she can make informed decisions about her hormones, not choices based on fear.

The WHI study was released in July 2002. It included 16,609 women, ages 50 to 79, with an average age of 63. The study was designed to review estrogen plus progesterone therapy in women who had not undergone hysterectomies. If these women chose to take hormones, they needed to take estrogen and progesterone. Progesterone balances the effects of estrogen on the uterus and prevents overgrowth of the uterine lining.

The medication being studied was Prempro, a combination of estrogen and progesterone. The estrogen component of Prempro is Premarin, a mixture of estrogens known as conjugated equine estrogens (CEE). These estrogens are obtained from the urine of pregnant mares, thus the name, PREgnant MARe urINE. The most abundant estrogen in Premarin is estrone sulfate. Once absorbed, estrone sulfate is converted to estradiol, a naturally occurring, bioidentical estrogen, the most active form of estrogen in women. Hormones marketed as bioidentical are synthesized from plants. In this case, bioidentical is a marketing term, not a medical designation. There are many bioidentical hormone options. Details about that would require another article.

The progesterone in Prempro is a progestin, medroxyprogesterone acetate. (That’s a mouthful, so we call it Provera, or just MPA.) Progestins were synthesized years ago, because women’s bloodstreams didn’t absorb the naturally occurring form of progesterone well enough to have a clinical effect. Too little of the medication survived digestion. The development of progestins gave us a useful form of oral progesterone and made birth control pills and hormone replacement therapy possible. All birth control pills contain progestin as the form of progesterone.

In July 2002, before the WHI results were published, and before physicians had a chance to review the data, media sources from CNN to the “New York Times” reported that women on hormones had a “26 percent increase in breast cancer.” Yikes! That’s more than one in four! I’d throw my hormones away too!

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I am not sure that I agree with this perspective – but I posted it for you, the reader to decide.  Even the National Institute of Health acknowledges the relationship between HRT and breast cancer.  Breast cancer rates have gone down dramatically since the 2002 study and women stopped taking HRT.  Synthetic hormones or anything else we put into our bodies are not good for our health.  PERIOD.

Read the complete article and related information at Where Are My Ruby Slippers? A Discussion of Hormone Therapy

Woman, Children and the Family

October 3, 2010

Are you debating hormone replacement therapy? If so, you’re not alone. According to the US Census Bureau, there were an estimated 78.2 million baby boomers, as of July 1, 2005, and over 47 million of them are women experiencing discomfort from menstruation to menopause, and even loss of libido.

For those who still do not use any Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), the idea of anti-aging and bio-identical hormones has become intriguing. A myriad of products on the market make the right choice difficult.

People have become accustomed to talking about bio-identical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT) in menopause and anti-aging medicines versus synthetic big pharmaceutical products like Prempro from Wyeth. Bio-identical hormone products are usually created from natural sources of plant hormones which match the chemical structure of hormones produced by the human body. The premise is that the body can’t distinguish created bio-identical hormones from the ones the female ovaries produce naturally.

The term bio-identical has basically become a catch all phrase for anything that is not a synthetic hormone. However “bio-identical” hormones can only be truly accurately bio-identical if the hormones for replacement mimic, not only those found in the body, but mimic the natural biological process as well.

In other words, natural plant derived hormones can accurately be termed bio-identical only when they are dosed in a Biomimetic fashion; that would be in a rhythm. Biomimetic hormones, the scientifically accurate term, are derived from plant sources and mimic in the body the natural undulating or wavelike rhythms of the hormone blood levels in a normal menstrual cycle in a healthy young woman.

This is the natural rhythm that’s missing from other bio-identical and synthetic hormone replacement therapies. It is the absence of this natural rhythm, according to T.S. Wiley, who developed the Wiley Protocol, that is responsible for the side-effects in both camps.

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Read the complete article and related information at Menopause Health: Hormone Replacement Therapy Facts

The Times of India

September 30, 2010

Read the complete article and related information at HRT and the Pill lead to breast cancer

Birth control pills appear to remodel brain structure

Scientific American

By Craig H. Kinsley and Elizabeth A. Meyer September 28, 2010

It seems that weekly we hear about some professional athlete who sullies himself and his sport through abuse of steroids. The melodrama unfolds, careers and statistics are brought low and asterisked, and everyone bemoans another fallen competitor.  Yet there are millions of cases of steroid use that occur daily with barely a second thought:  Millions of women take birth control pills, blithely unaware that their effects may be subtly seeping into and modulating brain structure and activity.

It is a huge experiment whose resolution will not be known for a while, but a new study in the journal Brain Research demonstrates that the effects are likely to be dramatic.  It found that birth control pills have structural effects on regions of the brain that govern higher-order cognitive activities, suggesting that a woman on birth control pills may literally not be herself — or is herself, on steroids.

The human brain is a remarkable structure, not least because of its seemingly infinite capacity for change, adapting millisecond by millisecond.  Indeed, a structure with tens of billions of neurons, each of which has the ability to elaborate and branch and become more complex, while changing its activity in the process, is the very definition of change.  This so-called neuroplasticity is a hallmark of the nervous system.  It can, however, be augmented, boosted, by artificial means, and if we are not careful, the brain may go all catawampus.

Steroid hormones, which are excreted by endocrine organs such as testes and ovaries, flow in abundance throughout the bloodstream, reach target organs and structures, and exert powerful effects on them.  To wit, the cock’s comb, the buck’s antlers, the lion’s mane, the blood-engorged uterus.

What of the mammal’s nervous system?  It turns out that the brain is a veritable sponge for steroid hormones.  In the male, the androgen testosterone (or a metabolite) binds to brain receptors and sculpts that structure into the aggression-promoting, sex-craving, risk-taking regulator with which we are all familiar.  By the same token, the comparative lack of androgen hormones in the female produces the kinder, gentler, softer neural substrate that distinguishes itself from the male by dint of its vastly different behavioral repertoire.

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Read the complete article and related information at Women’s Brains on Steroids – Birth control pills appear to remodel brain structure

Reuters

(Reuters Health) – Hormone replacement therapy after menopause may interfere with the accuracy of mammograms used to screen for breast cancer — and the risk may be greater with hormones delivered by patch or injection compared with pills, a new study finds.

The findings, reported in the journal Menopause, add to the body of evidence that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) makes mammograms more difficult to interpret. And they also contradict the theory that HRT patches and injections might be less likely to cause problems than pills.

In addition, the study found that a newer type of hormone therapy used in some countries — a drug called tibolone, which has weak estrogen-like properties — seemed to affect mammogram accuracy just as much as conventional HRT did.

Using data from nearly 173,000 Danish women who underwent screening mammography between 1993 and 2007, researchers found that current hormone users were more likely to have a false-positive result than women who had never used HRT.

Of 39,104 women on HRT at the time of the mammogram, 602 — or about 1.5 percent — had a false-positive, meaning they turned out not to have cancer on further testing. That compared with 0.8 percent of the 133,638 women who had never used hormone therapy.

When the researchers looked at the various types of hormone therapy, they found that women using patches with combination estrogen-progesterone replacement, as well as those on injections of estrogen only, had about twice the false-positive risk of women using oral HRT.

Most women on HRT, regardless of the type, did not have a false-positive. Of the 529 women on estrogen-progesterone patches, for example, 16 had a false-positive.

And since this is the first study to find relatively greater risks associated with certain types of HRT, it is too soon to advise women to take oral forms in order to curb the chances of false-positive mammogram, according to the lead researcher on the work.

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Read the complete article and related information at More evidence hormone therapy can muddy mammograms

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Women who use estrogen-only hormone replacement therapy don’t appear to be at increased risk of dying from lung cancer.

That’s according to a new analysis of earlier data from postmenopausal women who had had their uterus removed (hysterectomy).

Previous studies of women with intact uteruses had shown that taking combined estrogen and progestin — a synthetic version of the hormone progesterone — raised the chances of dying from lung cancer (see Reuters Health story of September 21, 2009).

Estrogen alone, however, resulted in only one more lung cancer death than placebo pills over nearly eight years, Dr. Rowan T. Chlebowski, of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California, and colleagues reported Friday.

Overall, the researchers calculated that eight in 10,000 women would die from lung cancer every year, regardless of whether they took estrogen or placebo pills.

“These findings should be reassuring for women with previous hysterectomy, who use estrogen alone” for menopause symptoms, they write in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) remains the most effective therapy for menopausal symptoms like severe hot flashes and night sweats and has been shown to preserve women’s bone mass.

But millions of women stopped using it after a large U.S. government study in 2002 found that postmenopausal women given estrogen-plus-progestin had higher risks of heart attack, stroke, breast cancer and blood clots than women given a placebo.

“…Sometimes hormones are a great idea and sometimes they are not, so for most women I try to reassure them at first that we are very likely to be able to help reduce symptoms, but that some trial and error may be necessary.”
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And don’t forget it is our body’s that they do the trial and error on.

Read the complete article and related information at Estrogen-only therapy may not up lung cancer deaths

EmaxHealth

Read the complete article and related information at How Progestins in HRT Impact Risk of Breast Cancer

Impalpable Earth & Unattainable Sky

July 7, 2010

I was relaying the ins and outs of my day to my mother, when I got to the part about having to admit to my professor that no, I was not running a fever or suffering from some contagious disease–my problems were probably menstruation-related.

My mother’s response? “You didn’t actually say that, did you?” (“That” being “I think it’s menstrual-related.”)

Right. So, after an afternoon spent telling myself, “No, it’s okay, he asked about your health, you don’t have to be embarrassed,” it turns out that, yes, actually, I should be embarrassed about it.

Apologies for the rant, and Mom, if you read this, you know I love you, but I get really frustrated by the attitude that menstruation is some gross, unmentionable thing, something it’s acceptable to discuss with fellow women in hushed tones but HEAVEN FORBID it ever come up in conversation with men. I don’t know, maybe I’m just grosser than most people, but…come on. I’m not saying I like going around sharing the details of, I don’t know, my dirty pads or whatever with everyone I come across, but this is something that happens every month, to many, many women and quite a few trans men. With some of us, like me, it results in palpable physical symptoms, symptoms that I’m occasionally hard-pressed to hide from people. I’m not saying I don’t–I’ve spent many a class period silently telling myself not to throw up or to breathe deep and not to tense up, because it makes the cramping worse–but sometimes, I’m in a lot of pain, and when people ask me about why I can’t stand up straight with pain and I feel faint, why do I have to make up an excuse? Why is it so inappropriate for me to say, “Don’t worry, I think it’s menstruation-related” and leave it at that?

Perhaps the lady doth protest too much. But honestly, when I’m having my period, it weighs pretty heavily on the brain. Not every period is as bad as this one–in fact, I’d say only about one in every four qualifies as “really bad”–but just about every period for me involves some physical discomfort and a temporary change in my lifestyle (how and when I bathe, what I eat, what I wear, what I do between my classes or on the weekend). It’s something significant that happens in my life on a regular basis, something that affects me not only in the bathroom or when I’m in my bedroom alone, but when I’m in class, when I’m walking out and about, and when I’m hanging out with my friends. And yet–okay, you read my journal, so you know, I talk about my period on a not infrequent basis. I’m pretty open about it, and some of you who ate lunch with me in middle school know that I wasn’t too proud to beg a quarter or an extra pad when I needed it. And yet, for years as an undergraduate, I felt embarrassed about buying myself pads at the Walgreen’s, and I can’t even say how many times I’ve explained to people that I need to lie down because I’m just vaguely “not feeling well.”

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Great blog post – a really well-thought out article on what women deal with during the menstrual cycle.  To hide or not to hide – that is the great conundrum.

Read the complete article and related information at This is another post about menstruation. Sorry. But not too sorry.