Combined Hormone Therapy Found to Stimulate Breast Cancer

Hormone combination therapy, which was once believed to be the sole remedy for menopausal symptoms, could triple the risk of breast cancer according to new findings, the New York Times reported.

Hormone combination therapy not only causes malignant breast cancer, but stimulates the growth of breast cancer while making tumors harder to detect, leading to more critical problems.

The new results are expected to cause quite a stir as they even have shown additional side effects to the hormone therapy since the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) reported last July that hormone therapy caused dementia, breast cancer and heart attacks.

Prempro, a hormone combination of estrogen and progesteron was found to be dangerous as mentioned above in a joint study published in the latest edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, said Dr. Rowan T. Chlebowski, a medical oncologist at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center.

According to an in-depth analysis researchers conducted on 11,608 women suffering from menopausal symptoms by the NIH last year, of the women on hormone therapy, 25.4 percent had cancer that had begun to spread compared with only 16% in the placebo group.

The group using hormones had considerably larger tumors at an average of 1.7cm while the placebo group had an average of 1.5cm.

In addition, after one year of treatment, 9.4% of women in the hormone therapy group had abnormal mammograms, as opposed to only 5.4% in the placebo group.

Furthermore, the 24% higher chance of having cancer in the hormone therapy group also suggests that it is hard to diagnose cancer in the early stages because, if a person uses hormones, cancer cannot be detected during the first two years after beginning hormone therapy but would spread in a rapid manner.

The total number of women taking these hormones has declined more than 50% after the study by the LIH was announced last year. The government is advising the administration of combined hormone therapy.

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