Georgia Injury Lawyer Blog

Women taking hormone treatment after menopause are already known to have an increased the risk of developing breast cancer.

Now, a groundbreaking study has established that hormone therapy also makes it more likely that the cancer will be advanced and deadly.

Women who took hormones and developed breast cancer were more likely to have cancerous lymph nodes, a sign of more advanced disease, and were more likely to die from the disease than were breast cancer patients who had never taken hormones.

The reasons for this increased risk were not apparent from the study. But, previous studies have found that hormone treatment can cause delays in diagnosis by increasing breast density, making tumors harder to see on mammograms. Delayed diagnosis may increase the risk of death.

There is also data that suggests hormones may feed the growth of some breast cancers or the blood vessels that tumors need to grow and spread.

The hormone replacement therapy studied was the most commonly prescribed hormone replacement pill, Prempro.

According to one of the authors of the study, which was recently published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, many doctors assume that women can safely take hormones for four or five years for menopause symptoms. The data refutes this assumption that the therapy is safe for any period time.

The study included continuing follow-ups with 12,788 women who were in the Women’s Health Initiative, a federally financed study that compared women taking hormones with a group taking placebos. The study was stopped in 2002, three years ahead of schedule, because researchers found that the hormones were causing small but significant increases in the risk of breast cancer, heart disease, strokes and blood clots in the lungs.

The 2002 study had a huge impact. Before it was published there was a belief in the medical community that hormone therapy would reduce women’s risk of heart disease and generally keep them youthful and healthy.

Estimates were that before the 2002 study, six million American women had been taking hormones, but the number quickly fell by about half. The breast cancer rate also began to fall significantly, and many researchers attribute that to the decrease in hormone therapy.

The new study increased the average follow-up time to 11 years from the original 5.6 years. It is the first report from the Women’s Health Initiative that includes death rates from breast cancer related to hormone use.

The researchers found small but significant increases in several harmful effects in women who took the hormones. As the study previously showed, women taking hormones are more likely to develop invasive breast cancer. Their rate of the disease was 0.42 percent per year, compared with 0.34 percent per year in the placebo group.
Among women with breast cancer, those who took hormones were more likely to have cancerous lymph nodes, a sign of more advanced disease — 23.7 percent, versus 16.2 percent in the placebo group.

More women who took hormones died from breast cancer — 0.03 percent per year, versus 0.01 percent per year in the placebo group. That translates to 2.6 deaths per 10,000 women per year among those taking hormones, twice the 1.3 deaths per 10,000 in the placebo group.

Among women who had breast cancer, those who took hormones also had a higher death rate from other causes — 0.05 percent per year, versus 0.03 percent per year. In other words, there were 5.3 versus 3.4 deaths per 10,000 women per year — 1.9 extra deaths in hormone users.

Not unexpectedly, Pfizer, which makes Prempro, issued a statement saying it took the new findings seriously, but questioned the mortality figures.