Hi Beautiful Friends,
Did you know that…
The Women's Health Initiative -- the biggest, most expensive hormone study to date -- rather than studying the impacts of hormone therapy on perimenopausal women treating their symptoms to improve quality of life, studied women with an average age of 63 for whom decreased levels of hormones had already begun to bring on bodily changes and disease?
On July 9th, 2002, a week before the study was published, a small number of principal investigators of the WHI put together a hasty press release misleadingly linking hormones to breast cancer? (A. Bluming, MD & C. Tavris, PhD, Estrogen Matters, p. 28)
In a 2006 update of the same cohort of women, the WHI found that the reported increase in breast cancer had vanished, but this news somehow never made headlines? (A. Bluming, MD & C. Tavris, PhD, Estrogen Matters, p. 29)
In the Nurses' Health Study, Harvard researchers found that women who used hormones were 50 percent* less likely to have heart attacks than those who didn't? (T. Parker-Pope, The Hormone Decision, p. 153)
In a 2022 Position Statement, the North American Menopause Society (recently renamed The Menopause Society) re-examined the hormone therapy trials and studies and concluded that, for healthy women with menopausal symptoms who are younger than 60 or within 10 years after menopause onset, the benefits outweigh the risks?
Some of these benefits include: cardiovascular, bone, brain, genitourinary, vasomotor, metabolic, colon, skin, joint, muscle, sleep, and mood.
Watch Dr. Sharon Malone dispel some of the WHI findings on Oprah.
For an in-depth look at the WHI, please see my blog post:
In Solidarity
*The results for cardiovascular benefits from the Nurses’ Health Study vary between 40-50% depending on the source, which is an example of how scientific data is subject to both interpreation and changes over time. Tara Parker-Pope was referencing the 10 year follow-up article from the NEJM for which one of the writers was Joann Manson, one of the principle investigators of both the Nurses’ Health Study and the WHI.