Hormone-Replacement Therapy Linked to Higher Ovarian Cancer Risk

Women in menopause who had hormone-replacement therapy were 38 percent more likely to develop deadly ovarian cancer, according to a Danish study.

Researchers studied nearly one million Danish women between the ages of 50 and 79 and found one more case of ovarian cancer for every 8,300 taking hormone therapy per year. Over the eight-year duration of the study, there were 140 more cases of ovarian cancer diagnosed in women who had hormone therapy, the researchers said.

“Even though this share seems low, ovarian cancer remains highly fatal, so accordingly this risk warrants consideration when deciding whether to use (hormone therapy),” wrote researcher Lina Steinrud Morch and colleagues at Copenhagen University, who conducted the study.

Ovarian cancer can be very difficult to catch early before it spreads and for that reason is often fatal. About 18 out of 100,000 women in the United States are diagnosed each year with ovarian cancer, which claimed the lives of some 15,000 Americans in 2007, according to the American Cancer Society.

The exact cause of ovarian cancer is not known, but the hormone estrogen is believed to trigger tumor growth.

Study Finds Increased Risk

Nine percent of the menopausal women in the study were taking hormone therapy at the time they were diagnosed with ovarian cancer, while 22 percent used hormone-replacement therapy before their diagnosis, and 63 percent did not take it. Researchers determined that having used hormone therapy gave women in the study a 38-percent increase in the risk of ovarian cancer compared to non-users.

The increased risks of ovarian cancer were roughly the same regardless of how long the women used the therapy, the formulation of the hormones used, how the therapy was administered, the dose of estrogen used, and other factors, researchers said.

The good news? Researchers said the increased cancer risk had been reduced to near normal about two years after the women stopped hormone-replacement therapy.

In 2002, a study conducted by Women’s Health Initiative had to be halted early after it was found hormone therapy increased the risk of ovarian and breast cancer, stroke, and other serious health problems. Those results caused many women to get off hormone-replacement therapy and dropped sales of drugs used in the treatments by as much as 50 percent.

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