Breast Cancer Breast Cancer Treatment Hormone Therapy

Hormone Therapy: Does It Improve Quality of Life?

By Christine Haran

Few women's health studies have created as many shock waves as the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), which found that hormone therapy offered more risks than benefits to postmenopausal women who still had their uteruses. Since those results were published in July 2002, many women have stopped taking hormone therapy. This April, researchers published a study examining hormone therapy's impact on quality of life in WHI participants.

Combination hormone therapy, consisting of estrogen and progestin, has been prescribed for decades to quell the symptoms of menopause, prevent heart disease and osteoporosis, and "slow the aging process," thereby helping women no longer producing estrogen stay healthy and feel youthful. This recommendation was based on patients' accounts of their improved health and studies that observed women who were taking hormones and those were not. It is now known that the lower rates of disease and higher quality of life in the women in these studies who took hormones was more likely due to their better overall health than the effects of the hormones. These women tended to be, for example, thinner and to have better access to healthcare. The WHI was the first clinical trial to follow women who were randomly selected to receive either estrogen alone, or in combination with progestin, or an inactive substance.