Hormone Replacement Therapy Update

Hormone replacement therapy after menopause may worsen breast cancer.
The CBS Evening News (10/19, story 4, 2:35, Couric) reported, "For women going through menopause, the decision about whether to take hormone replacement therapy has been controversial and confusing." In 2009, "40 million prescriptions for hormones were filled here in the US, but there's new evidence tonight that this treatment may be even riskier than previously thought."
ABC World News (10/19, story 4, 0:25, Sawyer) reported, "The Women's Health Initiative reports today that among post-menopausal women, the use of estrogen and progestin is not only linked to an increased risk of breast cancer, but the kind that kind of cancers that have higher fatality rates. The safety of more hormone replacement therapy was first questioned in 2002."
NBC Nightly News (10/19, lead story, 2:30, Williams) reported, "Our lead story tonight has to do with an emotional and perplexing topic for millions of American women -- hormone replacement therapy; specifically, its relationship to breast cancer." Chief science reporter Robert Bazell explained that a new study published Oct. 20 in the Journal of the American Medical Association "suggests that hormone replacement therapy, estrogen plus progestin, once the most commonly prescribed medication for women 50 and older, not only increases the risk of aggressive breast cancer, but increases the risk that cancers will be more advanced and deadly."
In a follow-on piece, NBC Nightly News (10/19, story 2, 3:30, Williams) reported, "Some big questions come out of this. What does this all mean?" Dr. Beth Dupree, medical director of the Breast Health Program at Holy Redeemer Health System in Pennsylvania, explained to viewers that women who are using or considering taking hormone replacement therapy to manage the symptoms of menopause need to "weigh the risks and benefits" in the light of severity of symptoms and discuss them with their physicians. Dr. Dupree also added that the "study shows women are dying at a higher frequency and those hormones probably played a role in that."
On its front page, the New York Times (10/20, A1, Grady) reports, "Hormone treatment after menopause, already known to increase the risk of breast cancer, also makes it more likely that the cancer will be advanced and deadly," the study found. Specifically, "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." Notably, "the treatment studied was the most commonly prescribed hormone replacement pill, Prempro [conjugated estrogens and medroxyprogesterone], which contains estrogens from horse urine and a synthetic relative of the hormone progesterone."