Tuesday March 8, 2016 (foodconsumer.org) -- Estrogen plus progestin hormone therapy intended to relieve women's menopausal symptoms has been found to increase risk of heart disease, breast cancer and lung cancer. After 5.6 years of treatment and 8 years of follow-up without treatment, treated women were 71% more likely to die from lung cancer than women who did not receive the hormone therapy.   The cancer-causing effect of the treatment was so significant that the trial had to be discontinued earlier than planned.

A new study that followed the patients for 14 years found the cancer-causing effect of estrogen plus progestin hormone therapy were attenuated.  The study showed the treated women were 9 % more likely to die from lung cancer compared to those who did not receive the hormone treatment.  But researchers said the difference was not statistically significant.

The data for the current study came from the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) estrogen plus progestin trial which enrolled 16,608 postmenopausal women aged 50 to 79 years.  In the trial, participants were assigned either to receive treatment with 0.625 mg conjugated equine estrogen plus 2.5 mg medroxyprosterone acetate or placebo.  The study was intended to see if deaths from lung cancer were more common among the hormone-treated women than those taking placebo. (David Liu)

Rowan T. Chlebowski, Heather Wakelee, Mary Pettinger, Thomas Rohan, Jingmin Liu, Michael Simon, Hilary Tindle, Catherine Messina, Karen Johnson, Ann Schwartz, Margery Gass, Jean Wactawski-Wende, Estrogen Plus Progestin and Lung Cancer: Follow-up of the Women's Health Initiative Randomized Trial, Clinical Lung Cancer, January 2016Volume 17, Issue 1, Pages 10–17.e1