At Our Bodies Our Blog: Hormone Replacement Therapy and Lung Cancer
September 24, 2009
At Our Bodies Our Blog today I have a piece on a new study that has been in the news on hormone replacement therapy and its association with risk of lung cancer. The quality of the study is, uh, not great. Find out why, and what it does say.
Advertisement
3 Comments
leave one →
Progestin, which is artificial progesterone, is the problem; this has been known for years. It’s a deadly thing.
Hormone replacement that is estrogen alone or estrogen combined with natural progesterone yields different outcomes from progestin in studies.
The women on the estrogen-progestin combo are women who still have their uterus. Women who have the uterus removed can go on estrogen alone and/or supplement with natural progesterone if they go the hormone-replacement route. Women with a uterus can also use natural progesterone instead of progestin. However, many women who have gone through menopause cannot tolerate progesterone, even natural, or cannot tolerate it in any but very small amounts.
There is no one-size-fits-all in hormone replacement. Every woman’s glandular makeup is unique to some degree.
But progestin unfailingly signals bad outcome.
Thanks for your comment, Donna. I want to read more about this topic generally, but this particular study (which is estrogen+progestin as you suggest) was just not great quality.
If it is true that hormone replacement therapy significantly raises the risk of death from lung cancer then they should stop implementing it. Thanks for sharing the links.