Health

A Provocative Study Shows Taking Estrogen Drops Breast Cancer Mortality

While it has risks, HRT in the form of estrogen alone is associated with lower risk of getting (and dying from) breast cancer.

Photo by Ben Hershey on Unsplash

The Women’s Health Initiative clinical experiment aimed, among other goals, to better understand the relationship between hormone replacement therapy and breast cancer risk. Now we get news about hormones and mortality. Today, we turn to a surprising new finding.

We begin with a nod to the ever-present and provocative headlines. Hormonal replacement therapy is going to give you breast cancer. Or dementia. On the other side, we hear HRT will make you forever young.

Here is the opinion of physician Robert Wilson, writing in his 1966 bestseller Feminine Forever: “Menopause is an illness, and the cure is hormones, without which women are condemned to witness the death of their own womanhood.”

Continuing, he opined that “I have often been haunted by the thought that except for the tiny stream of estrogen… this woman might have died a violent death at the hands of her own husband.” Perhaps not surprisingly, the author got money from Wyeth, the pharmaceutical maker of the drug he promoted.