Hormone therapy for postmenopausal women—An unanswered issue

Postmenopausal hormone replacement therapy.

Several comprehensive accounts of postmenopausal hormone replacement treatment have been published in the United Kingdom in the past year`so in this review we concentrate on areas which, while often controversial, are of concern to the practising physician. We discuss the effects of postmenopausal hormone replacement therapy on the risks of developing coronary heart disease, osteoporosis, and c...

Postmenopausal hormone therapy--good for smokers?

In premenopausal women, estrogen therapy has different effects in smokers and nonsmokers. Studies of oral contraceptive pills consistently find that hormone use results in a much higher relative risk for cardiovascular events in smokers than in nonsmokers. For example, in the World Health Organization Collaborative Study of Cardiovascular Disease and Steroid Hormone Contraception, use of oral c...

Postmenopausal hormone therapy: a reversal of fortune.

How did it become common clinical practice in past decades to prescribe postmenopausal hormones for the prevention of coronary heart disease (CHD)? Postmenopausal hormone therapy (HT), although approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of postmenopausal symptoms and the prevention of osteoporosis, was never approved for the prevention of CHD. The recent data from the Wom...

Postmenopausal hormone therapy: does it cause incontinence?

OBJECTIVE To estimate the effect of hormone therapy on risk of stress and urge urinary incontinence. METHODS The Heart Estrogen/progestin Replacement Study was a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blinded trial to evaluate daily oral conjugated estrogen (0.625 mg) plus medroxyprogesterone acetate (2.5 mg) therapy for the prevention of heart disease events in women with established heart d...

Where postmenopausal hormone therapy stands today.