HRT study flawed?

Last year's HRT study was flawed & is not applicable in women going through menopause.

A leading group of researchers have reported in the journal 'Fertility and Sterility' that the American study that triggered a worldwide scare over the risks of Hormone Replacement Therapy was fundamentally flawed and it is not applicable to most women going through the menopause.

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Last year, the study on HRT at Cancer Research UK's Epidemiology Unit at Oxford, which involved 16,000 women, was abandoned after five years of continuous research because the results appeared to show that HRT increased the risk of heart disease and breast cancer.

However, the latest study says that the women recruited for the study were not representative of those taking the drug and the results were wrongly interpreted.

According to the authors of the study, most subjects were in their 60s, some were in their early 70s and almost all had long since gone through the menopause.

In fact, most of the subjects were suffering from heart disease before the study had started.

"It's a very sad outcome from a very important study. But this was a study on ageing women who very likely already had some level of cardiovascular disease when they started," The Telegraph quoted Frederick Naftolin, Professor at Yale University and lead author of the study, as saying.

"People interpreted them as having implications for younger women, that was the real tragedy. This meant women who would have been on hormones were frightened away from starting. Women, who were older and had been doing well, stopped being protected. The result was misinterpreted," added Naftolin.