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For women with night sweats, hot flashes and other symptoms of menopause, hormones can provide a big relief.
But a new study provides more evidence that they should be cautious about using them, a local cancer specialist said Monday.
The findings suggest that hormone replacement therapy, already linked to increased risk of breast cancer, heart disease and stroke, nearly doubles a woman’s risk of dying from lung cancer.
Dr. Apar Ganti, an oncologist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, said women taking estrogen and progestin for menopause should talk with their doctor to determine if the risks of the hormones outweigh the benefits.
The findings on lung cancer were published recently online in the medical journal Lancet.
Ganti wasn’t an author of the study report but wrote an editorial that accompanied it.
“It is difficult to presume that the benefits of routine use of such therapy for menopausal symptoms outweigh the increased risks,” Ganti wrote.
Dr. J. Christopher Gallagher, professor of medicine at Creighton University School of Medicine, said women should not overreact to the report.
He said the study showed that there was not a significant increase in lung cancer deaths among nonsmoking women ages 50 to 59 taking hormones. The early 50s is when most women experience menopause symptoms and take hormones, he said.
He said nonsmoking women age 50 to 55 should not worry about taking hormones for their menopause, as long as they are on them for only one or two years.
The findings come from the Women’s Health Initiative, a large study originally begun in 1991 to demonstrate, in part, that the administration of a combination of estrogen and progestin could relieve debilitating symptoms of menopause and reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke. The hormone replacement part of the study, which enrolled more than 16,000 women, was halted prematurely after about 5½ years when it was observed that the risks far outweighed any potential benefits.
The findings suggest that the hormones do not cause lung cancer but that they accelerate the growth of existing tumors, making them more aggressive and more likely to metastasize, said Dr. Rowan Chlebowski of the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.
The first results from the initiative suggested that the hormones might have an effect on lung cancer. To further explore a link, Chlebowski and his colleagues studied the women in the initiative for an additional 2½ years.
This report includes material from the Los Angeles Times.
Contact the writer:
444-1122, michael.oconnor@owh.com
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