Estrogen And Cancer
Fear Factor:
Too many patients and health care providers think estrogen drives cancer for women and testosterone drives cancer in men.
I will echo Dr. Abraham Morgentaler, associate professor of Urology at Harvard, and Dr. Lindsey Berkson to sa
It doesn’t make physiologic sense.
But the initial misinterpretation of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study, published in July 2002, has had an unfortunate ripple effect still felt today.
A New Interpretation:
A study was published for pre-print in the Yale version of the British Medical Journal in May of 2022. Title: Effects of Hormone Therapy on survival, cancer, cardiovascular and dementia risks in 7 million menopausal women over age 65: a retrospective observational study. By Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.A)
This study looked at 7 million enrollment records of female Medicare beneficiaries age 65 and older from 2007-2019.
Estrogen Protects Against Cancer:
Within this newer study was a 19 yr re-analysis of the WHI, sponsored by 12 cancer centers showing that if women took estrogen therapy, they had a 23% reduction in risk of getting breast cancer for the next 20 yrs, even if only on it for a short while.
Estrogen statistically reduced not just the risk of breast cancer, but also ovarian, uterine, lung, and colorectal cancer by 33%, if one had been on estrogen for at least 5 years.
If participants were on estrogen therapy and then developed breast cancer, they had a 44% less risk of dying from it!
No other therapy has ever shown this level of protection in breast cancer fatality before.
What about the “Estrogen Window”?
The “estrogen window” means women should not start estrogen therapy if they are more than 10 years out from menopause.
Overall, estrogen therapy was beneficial for the women studied to varying degrees. Recall, all the women in this study were at least 65 years of age. This brings to question the legitimacy of the “estrogen window”. I have never felt this recommendation to be based in solid science. This study lends more evidence to question this recommendation.
In my view, estrogen therapy, if given in the correct route of administration, the correct dose, and if tracked with the correct testing medium, along with the study of many other aspects of health, should be given to women of any age during and after menopause. *There are exceptions to this, one of which is an active estrogen dependent cancer.
And from the words of Dr. Lara Wiliams (an integrative OBGYN in Portland, OR), hormones do not need to be stopped at age 65; “I only remove hormone replacement from my patients rigor mortis’d hands”.
I agree.
Live Longer and Healthier:
Many studies demonstrate that taking estrogen therapy allows women to live longer and healthier.
This has been proven in many countries around the world, so much so that they offer FREE hormone prescriptions to their menopausal women, as they live longer and the medical systems are less burdened in regard to cancers, heart disease, osteoporosis, and mental health disorders.
The Nordic countries have been offering this for years. Now Whales, Ireland, Scotland, Italy, and England have joined.
I hope that the US will follow suit, but I won’t be holding my breath, and I hope you don’t either.
My recommendation . . . push for what you want. Be willing to go outside the conventional medical system box in order to access the best healthcare for your unique being.
💕
Dr. Laura Neville