Women under 60 who’ve recently transitioned into menopause should continue being offered hormone therapy to relieve some of their symptoms, including hot flashes and night sweats, according to findings from a major study published this month in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association.
When used in menopause — a term that means someone has gone a full year without having a menstrual period — hormone therapy involves taking estrogen, often in combination with progestin, to help make up for what’s lost when menstruation stops and the ovaries are no longer producing hormones. In the US, the average age of menopause is 51.
Though the study doesn’t support the use of hormone therapy for reducing the risk of heart disease or other chronic diseases, as has been suggested in some earlier studies, the findings are significant for a couple of reasons. They included information from the Women’s Health Initiative, the largest clinical study of women in the US, which enrolled thousands of women of menopausal age and has followed them for years, studying different aspects of health, like cardiovascular health and other disease risk.
Discussions over the use of hormonal therapy were clouded years earlier, however, when reports from the same ongoing study linked adverse health events in older women to the therapy, prompting many people to lose access to or guidance toward the treatment, without an adequate alternative to relieve some menopause symptoms that can greatly impact quality of life.
The latest findings confirm that, for many women early in their menopause years, the benefits of hormone therapy in relieving distressing symptoms such as hot flashes, night sweats and genital and urinary tract problems, outweigh the risks.
Hormone therapy, or hormone replacement therapy, is a general term that describes someone taking synthetic versions of the hormones the body produces naturally.