A new analysis of a subgroup of participants in the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) hormone therapy clinical trials suggests that healthy, postmenopausal women whose blood cholesterol levels are normal or lower are not at increased, short-term risk for heart attack when taking hormone therapy.

A research study has found that a simple blood test may indicate whether post-menopausal hormone therapies present an elevated risk of a heart attack.

Women who take postmenopausal hormones appear to have a lower risk of developing advanced stages of the eye disease age-related macular degeneration, especially if they had also taken oral contraceptives in the past, according to a report in the April issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

The Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) investigators have produced another article [1], which probably marks the opening of another set of publications, in which the consequences of a further 2.4-year follow-up (after cessation of the study medication) on the estrogen + progestogen (E + P) cohort are reported.

An increased cancer risk in post-menopausal women after they stopped taking combined hormone therapy was an “unexpected finding” in a study that will be reported in the March 5 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), said Rowan T. Chlebowski, M.D., Ph.D., a Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute (LA BioMed) lead investigator who contributed to the study.

WHI follow-up study confirms health risks of long-term combination hormone therapy outweigh benefits for postmenopausal women

A follow-up study of women who stopped taking the hormone therapy of estrogen plus progestin after this intervention was discontinued as part of a clinical trial indicates that these women may have an increased risk of cancer, compared to women in the placebo group, according to a study in the March 5 issue of JAMA.

Solvay SA, the world's largest maker of male hormone therapies, dropped the most in more than two years in Brussels trading after U.S. partner Wyeth ended a partnership on psychiatric treatments.

Although rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is more predominant in women, the reasons for this are unclear. Many studies have examined the effects of estrogen on the risk and severity of RA, but the results are conflicting and controversial.

Hormones produced by the heart eliminated human pancreatic cancer in more than three-quarters of the mice treated with the hormones and eliminated human breast cancer in two-thirds of the mice, according to researcher David Vesely, a doctor at the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa and a professor at the University of South Florida (USF).

Combined hormone therapy appears to increase the risk that women will have abnormal mammograms and breast biopsies and may decrease the effectiveness of both methods for detecting breast cancer, according to a report in the February 25 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Researchers report that just four months of hormonal therapy before and with standard external beam radiation therapy slowed cancer growth by as much as eight years—especially the development of bone metastases—and increased survival in older men with potentially aggressive prostate cancer.