Health & Medicine 6/9/03
Bad news hormones
Add dementia to heart
disease and cancer risk
By Amanda Spake
usnews.com
The bad news about
hormone therapy just keeps getting worse. New
findings from the largest study of hormone
replacement therapy indicate that older women taking
a combination of estrogen plus progesterone have
twice the risk of developing Alzheimer's
disease and other dementias as do women taking a
sugar pill, or placebo. None of the 4,532 women over
65 in the Women's Health Initiative Memory
Study (WHIMS) had dementia prior to the trial. Half
took Wyeth's drug Prempro and half the placebo.
At the trial's end four years later, 61 had
developed dementia--40 on HRT and 21 taking the
placebo. "We see a clear and significant risk
of dementia for women taking the combination hormone
therapy," says Sally Shumaker, professor at
Wake Forest University School of Medicine and a lead
WHIMS researcher.
Older observational studies
had raised hopes that hormones might actually slow
development of Alzheimer's, which afflicts 10
percent of people over 65 and 50 percent of those 85
years or older. According to Shumaker, there's
been an upsurge in the number of older
postmenopausal women who have turned to hormone
replacement therapy to prevent memory loss and
mental decline. But when WHIMS researchers looked
only at the women in the high-risk group (who had
suffered a stroke or had low cognitive test scores),
combination HRT "did not slow the dementia, as
many had hoped," says Shumaker. "It
accelerated it. Clearly, there is no reason for
older women to take combination HRT."
Researchers emphasize that the risk of dementia for
any one woman taking HRT is small. And Wyeth, the
maker of Prempro, notes that the study applies only
to older women. Most HRT users are newly menopausal
and taking the drugs to relieve symptoms such as hot
flashes. WHIMS researchers will follow the
participants to see if their risk of dementia
declines after they stop using HRT.
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