Women Health News

But doctors concern that women with strict menopausal symptoms will overreact to the risks and refuse themselves the benefits of hormones.

"There are some women who really require treatment. ... I worry that they will be talked out of it," said Dr. JoAnn Manson, a women's health expert at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

Hormone use plummeted following a 2002 study found that it raised the risk of breast cancer, heart disease and other troubles. Before that, the pills were thought to avoid many of those conditions, and doctors prescribed them as little fountains of youth.

Researchers reported that the rate of breast cancer in the United States dropped over 7 percent in 2003, the year following that landmark study. The reaction against hormones is measured the leading details for the decline.

Some women are still with hormone therapy "because their doctors genuinely believe that it prevents some diseases," said Dr. Isaac Schiff of Massachusetts General Hospital, who headed a panel for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that recommended in 2004 that doctors not refuse to give the treatment from women who really need it.

But that's not as many women as you might think, Manson said.

About 2 million women begin menopause each year in the United States, but only about one-fourth have moderate to severe symptoms lasting longer than four years, said Manson, whose new book, "Hot Flashes, Hormones & Your Health," includes a flowchart to help women make a decision whether to use hormones, which type and for how long.

Patches and gels are previously known to be useful for reducing the hot flashes and sleep-interrupting night sweats that plague a lot of women. No one knows whether they will establish safer than pills in terms of breast cancer, heart attack or stroke risk. A large study recently under way may answer the question.

But if they do, it may lessen some of the backlash against hormones since a landmark study in 2002 scare many women away from their use. Critics of that study have long contended that it is the type of estrogen or progestin, the dosage, and the technique of taking the hormones that may influence the health risks.

The French study, while not the last, word is the strongest proof yet that this may be true, said Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She has no financial ties to hormone drug makers and just published a book giving women suggestion on hormone use.

Proof is mounting that the method of taking a drug and probably the dose are important things, she wrote in an editorial accompanying the study in the journal Circulation.

Millions of women dumped hormone pills following the Women’s Health Initiative study reported in 2002 higher rates of stroke among those taking estrogen, and of stroke and breast cancer with estrogen-progestin use.

The study tested Wyeth’s Prempro and Premarin, which have synthetic estrogens made from the urine of pregnant horses. Lot of people trust that estrogens from plant sources are nearer to what the human body naturally produces and may be safer. The plant forms are in many competitors’ pills and also in patches, creams and gels.