ERT Does Not Reduce Alzheimer’s Risk
I frequently have patients asking me if they should go on or stop taking HRT. My first question is to find out why the patient has an interest in taking it in the first place. Hot flashes? Vaginal dryness? Worried about heart disease or osteoporosis? Alzheimer’s? The patient needs to answer this question for themselves and we can go from there. There are a myriad of ways to affect these symptoms (and that’s exactly what they are) that do not involve drugs. I can list 15 things to do to lower your risk of heart disease that DO NOT increase your risk of breast cancer…
Arch Neurol 2001;58:435-440 The use of estrogen replacement therapy (ERT) by postmenopausal women does not reduce their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Dr. David A. Drachman, of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester, used the General Practice research Database in the UK, which includes prescription data, to identify 112,481 postmenopausal women who used ERT and an age-matched cohort of 108,925 women who had not used ERT. From these groups they conducted a nested case-control analysis of 59 women with newly diagnosed AD and 221 matched controls. “Among the 59 newly diagnosed cases of AD, 15 (25%) were current estrogen users, while among the controls, 53 (24%) were current users,” the investigators report. After adjustment for body mass index and smoking, the odds ratio for AD in women who had used estrogen for at least 1 year was 1.18 compared with nonusers. When the authors combined past ERT users with current users, the odds ratio compared with nonusers 1.19. For those who used estrogen for at least 5 years, the odds ratio was 1.05. “Odds ratios were similar for estrogen recipients who received estrogens alone and recipients who received combined estrogen-progestin treatment,” Dr. Drachman and colleagues note.