Some women take hormone replacement therapy to relieve the symptoms associated with the fluctuating levels of female hormones that occur during menopause, but HRT has been linked with unwanted effects.
The Women's Health Initiative, a 15-year trial initiated by the National Institutes of Health to address cardiovascular disease (CVD), osteoporosis and cancer which commonly affect postmenopausal women, found that hormone replacement drugs can elevate the risks of stroke and heart attack in older women.
Many of the participants of the study were, however, way past menopause when they started with the hormone replacement therapy so S. Mitchell Harman, from the Phoenix VA Healthcare System, and colleagues conducted new research to determine if starting menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) soon after the onset of menopause can reduce the risks of cardiovascular disease.
For their study Hormone Treatment Beginning Near the Onset of Menopause, which was funded by the Kronos Longevity Research Institute, the researchers recruited more than 700 women between 42 and 58 years old who were no more than three years past the onset of their menopause and were not diagnosed with cardiovascular disease, and randomly assigned them to receive hormone therapy via estrogen patch, daily estrogen pill or placebo.
After four years, the researchers evaluated the changes in the thickness of the participants' carotid artery, which is located in the front of the neck and indicates risks of heart attack and stroke, as well as the amount of calcium deposited in their heart arteries, another marker of cardiovascular disease, and found no difference among the study participants.
"Four years of MHT started soon after menopause does not seem to alter the development of CVD," the researchers wrote in their study, which was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine on July 29.
Women who had hormone therapy were also found to be at no greater risk for breast cancer, strokes and heart attacks than those who took placebo. They also experienced up to 90 percent reduction in symptoms of low hormone levels which include hot flashes, mood swings and depression.
"For women with moderate to severe symptoms of early menopause, our study found that the benefits of hormone therapy for symptom reduction were likely to outweigh the risks," said study co-researcher JoAnn Manson, chief of Brigham and Women's Hospital's Division of Preventive Medicine. "But we're not going to recommend the initiation of hormone therapy for the express purpose of trying to prevent chronic disease in younger women."
