Blog of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research

Pfizer to pay $72 Million in Philadelphia PremPro Case

December 9th, 2011 by Chris Hitchcock

Three women who developed breast cancer after their use of combination hormone therapy have been initially awarded $72 million by a jury in Philadelphia, with further judgement about punitive damages still to come. The case concerns the use of PremPro, a combination of conjugated equine estrogen and medroxyprogesterone made by Wyeth. Wyeth has since been purchased by Pfizer. Women’s Health Initiative trial results released in 2002 found an increased risk of breast cancer in those randomized to estrogen + progestin compared with placebo. Earlier this year, Pfizer announced that it has set aside $772 million in its budget for settling PremPro lawsuits.

Prior to 2002, hormone replacement therapy was often recommended to otherwise healthy women as a health-enhancing preventative therapy. SMCR has long held that menopause is a natural stage in women’s lives, rather than a condition to be treated. Hormone therapy is no longer recommended for the prevention of disease in healthy women.

 

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Posted in Law/Legal, Menopause | Comments Off

Cardiovascular deaths increase with steady aging, not menopause

September 27th, 2011 by Chris Hitchcock

Earlier this month, researchers published a statistical analysis of mortality data in England, Wales and the United States, disproving the common statement that, after menopause, women face increased rates of mortality from heart disease. There are other studies that have come to similar conclusions, but there are a few things that make this study different. One is that it drew on epidemiological data from three different parts of the world, which reduces the likelihood of a local coincidence. A second is that they took care to create longitudinal data sets, comparing women born in different birth decades with the appropriate mortality over time. In doing so, they avoided the problems of cross-sectional data.

The authors found that there was a steady exponential increase in risk with age, and that there was no sign of accelerated risk at the typical age of menopause (50). They compared different versions of mortality curves, and were able to show that a two-stage model of mortality with a hinge at menopause was not a good fit to the data.

These findings have received national and international coverage, and are a major blow to the argument that menopausal women require premenopausal hormones to retain premenopausal protection from cardiovascular risk. Menopausal women are older than premenopausal women, and that is why they are more likely to die from cardiovascular disease, not because of the hormonal changes of menopause.

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Posted in Menopause, New Research | 1 Comment »

Menopause Isn’t for Dummies

September 23rd, 2011 by Elizabeth Kissling

Roseanne’s Nuts was one of the delights of summer 2011, especially for those of us who have missed the comedic talents of Roseanne Barr. If you don’t watch television (or are outside the US), Roseanne’s Nuts is Roseanne Barr’s return to episodic television, this time in the form of a reality show set on the star’s 40-acre macadamia nut farm in Hawaii. When her eponymous sitcom ended in 1997, she made a couple of attempts at talk show hosting, then left L.A. and the limelight to raise her youngest son and macadamias in Hawaii. He’s now a teenager, and the nuts are ready to harvest.

An ongoing thread of the show is Roseanne’s plan to harvest and distribute her nuts as a low-cost protein source for impoverished people. Each episode also has its own self-contained, seemingly unscripted plotline. Unlike many of today’s popular reality shows, however, there are no manipulated showdowns or drunken feuds. Much of the time, Roseanne and her family seem like everyone else’s family — if only the rest of us could live off sitcom residuals and were followed around by a camera crew. There is laughter and teasing, and some conflict underpinned with genuine affection, but everything isn’t always tidily resolved in 22 minutes.

In the Episode #15 (original air date September 10), 58-year-old Roseanne copes with continuing symptoms of menopause. It’s handled so honestly (for the most part) that I’m going to overlook the fact that the episode was titled “Menopause for Dummies”.* The episode opens with Johnny Argent, Roseanne’s manpanion**, sharing a list of menopause symptoms he has found on the internet. Roseanne acknowledges having them all, except for tingling in her extremities, and decides to visit her friend, Dr. Allen, and to investigate whether she should receive hormone treatments. (The full episode can be watched online at Lifetime.com until Oct. 11; preview a short clip at right.)

-+-+-+- SPOILERS AHEAD -+-+-+-

Roseanne visits Dr. Allen — on camera, of course — this is a reality show — and explains her concerns. He asks about her libido and her sex life, and she replies, “It’s like an old person’s”. She responds forthrightly to his suggestion that dryness may be the cause of her ‘feminine itching’: “that’s all dried up like a sonofabitch”. Dr. Allen wants to measure Roseanne’s hormone levels with a 24-hour urine test, as he believes that will provide more precise information than any blood test. Roseanne is horrified by his description of her contribution to the procedure (“You pee in a bucket for 24 hours”), but even more horrified by his other recommendation: she needs to exercise.

Roseanne tells the camera — the proxy for us, the audience at home — that she doesn’t know if she’ll go on hormones or not. Her women friends recommend red wine, saying it’s bad for menopause (“because it makes you sweat”) but good for the libido. Her eldest son Jake is delighted to hear that his mom is considering hormones, telling the camera, “After eight years of being batshit crazy, I think she’s finally ready. I’m so happy — once she gets hormones, my life’s gonna be a lot easier.”

Some of my SMCR colleagues who study menopause may cringe at these scenes, but I think they’re representative of the kind of communication many women experience around menopause; that is, well-meaning, if ill-informed, advice from friends and family. It feels like the kinds of conversations lots of us have in our own living rooms and front porches. It is this feeling of unscripted authenticity that draws viewers to Roseanne’s Nuts. I also note the special irony of menopause; after 20 or 30 years of our hormones being blamed for erratic and irritable behavior, we’re now advised to consume hormones to rein in our erratic and irritable “batshit crazy” behavior.  Continue reading...

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Posted in Celebrities, Media, Menopause, Television | 2 Comments »

Hormone Therapy and the Brain

November 24th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling

Medical-Anatomical-Superior-half-of-diseased-brainSo there’s a surge today in news stories about how hormone treatment for menopause (popularly known as ‘hormone replacement therapy’ or HRT) benefits the brain, apparently based on publicity over this study published in Hormones and Behavior. In media interviews, the researchers suggest that HT enhances the communication between left and right sides of the brain, making the older women’s brains more similar to those of younger women. The researchers had the women perform tasks designed to demonstrate fine motor coordination, such as tapping buttons with different fingers. Of the 62 women in the study, the 36 on hormone treatments showed higher levels of motor coordination, leading the researchers to conclude that hormone treatments, especially estrogen, “exert positive effects on the motor system thereby counteracting an age-related reorganization.”

Admittedly, I have not read the entire study, just the abstract and press summaries, but would you consider me too cynical if I suggested that the publicity this research report is receiving is more about promoting the use the hormones among menopausal women than the significance of the research findings?

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Posted in Menopause, New Research | 3 Comments »

Latest News on Hormone Therapy

June 23rd, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling
Wellcome Library, London // CC 2.0

Wellcome Library, London // CC 2.0

The Endocrine Society has released a new, peer-reviewed statement on the risks and benefits of hormone therapy for menopausal women. The upshot is that risks and benefits vary depending on the age of the patient and the length of time since menopause:

One interesting finding . . . was that women who start hormone therapy within 10 years of menopause have a 30% to 40% reduction in total mortality.

In addition, in the 50 to 55 age group the task force concluded that hormone therapy reduced hot flashes and overactive bladder and that vaginal estrogen reduced recurrent urinary tract infections. The evidence also showed that hormone therapy reduced pain on intercourse and improved quality of life.

Given that there are thousands of lawsuits pending over the role of HT in breast cancer, I was especially interested in this nugget of new information:

“Our conclusion is that [the estrogen/progestin hormone combination] didn’t cause breast cancer — it caused preexisting tumors to grow to a size where they became detectable.”


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Posted in Menopause, New Research, Pharmaceutical | 3 Comments »

More on life-giving female fluids

April 23rd, 2010 by Chris Hitchcock

When I was pregnant and then learning to breast-feed my daughter, my doula told me that breast milk had great anti-biotic properties, and that it was good to use on eye-infections and cuts. Turns out that there is science behind that. Not only that, but now scientists have shown that breast milk contains substances that may kill cancerous cells. They’re calling the extracted substance HAMLET – not sure why a substance extracted from lactating women would be named after a grieving, tortured young man struggling with suicidal and homicidal thoughts, but I’ll leave more thoughts on that to those who are better at post-modern analysis.

It reminds me of the idea of harvesting stem-cells from menstrual blood. And also some questions about that. Like, is this one of the cases where it matters what produced the menstrual blood? Not all episodes of menstrual bleeding are the same. So how does stem cell quality differ among these different sources of uterine blood?

  • a normal ovulatory cycle
  • normal-length but anovulatory cycle
  • very long or irregular cycles, which tend to be anovulatory
  • withdrawal bleed when you are on the pill
  • or even a post-menopausal vaginal bleed from taking sequential hormone therapy

I don’t even know if anyone is asking these questions, because there is relatively little interest or appreciation in the varieties of sources of menstrual blood and how it might change its quality.

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Posted in anatomy, Menstruation, New Research | 3 Comments »

Time and Time Again

April 18th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling

Guest Post by Paula S. Derry, Ph.D.

Déjà vu

An article in today’s New York Times Magazine recounts the author’s experience with a debilitating depression that began during her perimenopause, the transitional time leading up to menopause.   For her, prescription estrogen was a life-saver that alleviated her symptoms.  The article places her experience in the context of research on the Timing Hypothesis, an idea that arose after the Women’s Health Initiative, or WHI, research project.  WHI clinical trials documented that hormone supplements after menopause did not, as had previously been assumed, lower a woman’s risk of heart disease.  Heart disease risk was not lower, and, in fact, when a number of chronic illnesses were considered together, the medication did more harm than good overall.  The Timing Hypothesis is the idea that the WHI was fundamentally flawed, because hormones must be started right around the time of menopause to have a health-promoting effect and the subjects in WHI were on average over 60; if started when a woman is older, when chronic illnesses have already started, the hormones are actually harmful rather than helpful.  The Sunday New York Times article presents this idea uncritically, without quoting any of the many experts who do not find it plausible or convincing, and, in addition, presents a lurid, unscientific  description of perimenopausal hormonal dynamics with words like “ricocheting hormones” and an “upheaval” that causes a “hellacious strain” on the brain. The author suggests that WHI was  a poorly planned study that asked the wrong questions with the wrong methodology.  The Timing Hypothesis, if true, might lead to a cure for Alzheimers and have other important health repercussions.


Time for a reality check.

Let’s go back in time to before the WHI research. Beginning in the 1980s, professionals asserted that hormone therapies were safe and effective to prevent chronic illnesses, especially heart disease, in postmenopausal women.   This idea was aggressively promoted, and it was not limited to women around the time of menopause.  Clinical trials are required to prove that a new medication is safe and effective before the Food and Drug Administration will approve that medication. However, once approved and available on the market, it is okay for doctors to use their judgment and prescribe the drug for whatever use they believe is reasonable.  Many of the claims for estrogen were for this kind of off-label use because there was no clinical trial proof that estrogens reduced heart disease, made women “feel better,” or improved their lives in many other ways being claimed.  However, other kinds of evidence made it seem plausible. There were “biologically plausible” mechanisms–this means that because of things we know about the body–like the fact that there are estrogen receptors in the brain–it is plausible, we can hypothesize a way that  estrogen would have a certain health effect.  There were the personal experiences of women. There was the idea that menopause was intrinsically unhealthy and that women were not meant to “outlive their ovaries.” Using estrogens was compared by some to using vitamin supplements or to a diabetic using insulin. There was a strong conviction among certain enthusiastic scientists and practitioners, some of them highly respected individuals, that it was all so. Professional groups of various sorts frequently issue opinions about medications; here, many groups offered the opinion that all women be offered hormone treatment.  Physicians were encouraged to prescribe hormones for disease prevention because it was so certain that it would help their patients, rather than waiting for the slow process of clinical trials to take place. Wyeth, a pharmaceutical company,  asked the FDA to approve estrogen for heart disease prevention even without clinical trials.  Continue reading...

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Posted in Menopause, New Research, Newspapers, Pharmaceutical | 1 Comment »

Another Risk Associated with Hormone Therapy

February 7th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling

A study to be published in the British Medical Journal’s Thorax,* which focuses on respiratory medicine, finds that estrogen-only hormone treatment for menopause symptoms is associated with higher risk of asthma. The study involved nearly 58,000 women over 12 years. The researchers compared women who had never used any form of hormone treatment, women who used estrogen plus progestin, and women who used estrogen only treatment.Cartoon drawing of human lungs

The women who had used hormone treatments were 21% more likely to develop asthma; those who had used estrogen-only treatments showed a 54% higher overall risk of asthma.

Asthma is generally more common in young women after menarche, and more severe in women than in men.

*Neither the study nor the abstract appear to be available online.

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Newsflash: Women get older with or without hormone therapy

January 5th, 2010 by Elizabeth Kissling

Cover of journal MENOPAUSEAs we have often noted here, one of the key reasons the marketing of hormone therapy for menopausal women has been so successful is the misguided belief that menopause is an estrogen-deficiency disease. Among other purported disadvantages of the decline in estrogen that accompanies normal aging was the belief that this decline caused muscle loss and other declines in physical functioning. (Muscle cells have receptors for estrogen, and recent research has linked higher blood levels of the hormone to greater muscle strength in elderly women.)

But the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) is still providing new information about the lack of benefits of HT. (For those who are new around here, the WHI is a large US clinical trial begun in 1991, in which thousands of postmenopausal women were randomly assigned to take either HT or placebo pills. The study was abruptly ended ahead of schedule in 2002, when researchers discovered that the women taking the hormones had higher risks of heart attack, stroke, breast cancer, and blood clots – the very conditions the drugs were assumed to prevent – than placebo users.) In a new study based on a subgroup of 2400 women to be published in a forthcoming issue of Menopause (February 2010), both the women using HT and the placebo groups showed similar dips in muscle strength and walking speed over six years. In other words, women get older and show physical indications of aging with or without hormone therapy.





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Posted in Menopause, New Research, Pharmaceutical | 4 Comments »

Bioidentical Balderdash

January 1st, 2010 by Chris Hitchcock

The bioidentical hormone therapy industry has been getting a bad rap lately in the US, and this press release is an example of why. Among other things, the writer confuses estrogen and progesterone, in one paragraph saying their product is a “safe and scientifically-proven, all-natural estrogen delivery cream[]“, and in the next describing it as a “natural progesterone cream” (emphasis is mine). Moreover, the press release springboards from another estrogen-positive press release that claims that estrogen may be the cure for female depression, citing an ob/gyn author of a book, and promoting a soon-to-be-launched web page.

So, in one breath the product is an estrogen delivery cream that will help with low estrogen, but in the next breath (on the linked product page) it is argued that it will help with estrogen that is too high (which is more accurate). The product website emphasizes that  it is “without dangerous pharmaceuticals”:

This remarkable product contains NO risky synthetic estrogens or progestins. [Product] Cream is similar to the progesterone your body naturally produces, so there are no worries about dangerous interactions or nasty side effects.

It’s been said that there are no side effects, there are just effects. It is odd to marry this claim that their product won’t have nasty side effects (because it is like the progesterone in your body) with the claim that progesterone cream will balance out the nasty effects of your own high estrogen levels.

Progesterone cream may well be better tolerated, but just because it’s natural, doesn’t make it so.

And, interestingly, despite being anti-big Pharma, the article adopts the pharmaceutical industry’s language of menopause as “estrogen deficiency” that has been so helpful to those who would market “hormone replacement therapy” as a cure for all female ageing. As is still common, it is assumed that perimenopause (the transition leading up to the last period) is a time of dropping estrogen. There’s also the assumption that the challenging issues of midlife are necessarily hormonal (rather than multi-faceted, including not only biological changes, but also cultural views of ageing, social context, socioeconomic issues, divorce-related poverty, even spiritual and psychological development).

It’s unfortunate that bioidentical has come to be associated with fuzzy thinking and poorly supported claims, because there are good, solid, well-researched arguments in favour of using naturally occurring molecules for therapy, particularly for hot flushes and night sweats. We’re analyzing data from the first randomized placebo-controlled trial of oral micronized progesterone for hot flushes and night sweats in early menopause, and we should have some data later this year to report.

It’s also worth noting that other countries do it differently – Canadians can buy progesterone cream such as this, but they do it with a prescription, at a specified dose, and for a particular issue. And people who try to sell it over the counter in a health store are prosecuted.


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Posted in Health Care, Menopause, Pharmaceutical | 3 Comments »

Readers should note that statements published in re: Cycling are those of individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Society as a whole.