United States: It was found almost about 20 years ago that, a women’s health study investigated the impact of menopause hormones on women’s bodies.
As a result, millions of women and their doctors made it an ideal practice to discontinue using these medicinal products, which the world still practices today.
More about the Study
After a Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) follow-up for the long term proved the perception was clearly magnified. The newly identified research showed that women under 60 and with an acute case of menopause are more prone to preferably use hormonal medicines to manage the symptoms of menopause, which include hot flashes and night sweats.
The new research, which found its way to JAMA Journal, uncovered that young women who went through menopause and observed the symptoms can begin taking hormone remedies but with lower risks of unwanted effects.
Joann Manson, chief of the division of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the paper’s first author, said, “Women in early menopause with bothersome symptoms should not be afraid to take hormone therapy to treat them, and clinicians should not be afraid to prescribe them,” as the Washington Post reported.
Significance of the Study
The WHI study has been regarded as playing a fundamental role in women’s health as it has enlisted 160,000 women who were postmenopausal and aged between 50 and 79 years old.
Yet, a pilot study on the consequence of menopause hormone treatment in 2002 was stopped because of the information indicating a rise in risks of cardiovascular attack, stroke, pulmonary embolism, and cancer breasts for females taking hormones rather than a placebo.
It was during this time that a large number of women were forced to stop using hormones as it was causing significant disruption in some of them. Makes the most of bans doctors from disseminating information that hormone therapy relieves symptoms and prevents myocardial infarction, a widely held view of that time.
As a result of this study, many women, like the ones from those baby boomers and Gen X generations, now have to pass through these menopausal symptoms, including but not limited to hot flashes, night sweats, and emotional changes, without the hormonal treatments and medications that are available in the modern world.
Additional Study Findings
Further analysis suggested that the study’s design, which primarily involved older women, may have biased the results. Risks associated with hormone therapy were found to be more closely linked to advanced age (at menopause) when women rarely experienced symptoms warranting hormone treatment. Conversely, younger women in the study showed greater resilience.
Twenty years after the WHI study, a long-term follow-up of women from the study indicates that hormones are a relatively safe short-term treatment for menopausal symptoms in women under age 60.
However, these medications are generally not recommended for long-term use due to the risk of heart attack, dementia, and other chronic diseases.