More on Hormones & Breast Cancer
The latest reports on the link between hormones widely prescribed as therapy for some of the risks of menopause before 2002 and increased risks of ovarian and breast cancers apparently provide further evidence in support of such a link:
ATLANTA — Research on two continents signaled more bad news for menopause hormones, offering the strongest evidence yet that they can raise the risk of breast cancer and are tied to a slightly higher risk of ovarian cancer.
New U.S. government numbers showed that breast cancer rates leveled off in 2004 after plunging in 2003 — the year after millions of women stopped taking hormones because a big study tied them to higher heart, stroke and breast cancer risks. Experts said the leveling off shows that the 2003 drop in the cancer rate was real and not a fluke.
From 2001 to 2004, breast cancer rates fell almost 9 percent — a dramatic decline, researchers report in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. The trend was even stronger for the most common form of the disease — tumors whose growth is fueled by hormones. Those rates fell almost 15 percent among women ages 50 to 69, the group most likely to have been on hormone pills.
At the same time, a study of nearly 1 million women in the United Kingdom showed that those who took hormones after menopause were 20 percent more likely to develop ovarian cancer or die from it than women who never took the pills. That study was published online by the London-based journal The Lancet.
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For cautious scientists, the new breast cancer numbers were more evidence of the hormone-breast cancer link.
Prior commentary on this phenomenon on the MH Blog is here. This is a subject I have great interest in, because the phenomenon of uncertainty, especially as it relates to clinical medicine and science, seems to me to be extremely important to a number of legal and ethical issues. I tend to think that it is the epistemological problems that are often the thorniest.
Steph Tai, guest-blogging at Concurring Opinions, has some interesting thoughts on uncertainty in the wake of today's decision of Gonzales v. Carhart.
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