Taking hormones to combat menopause

Women Have Been Misled About Menopause https://nyti.ms/3wIGZIj

"Imagine that some significant portion of the male population started regularly waking in the middle of the night drenched in sweat...stumbled to work, exhausted, their morale low...It suggests that we have a high cultural tolerance for women's suffering...Now imagine that there was a treatment for all these symptoms that doctors often overlooked."

"perimenopause, the biologically chaotic phase leading up to a woman's last period, when her reproductive cycle makes its final, faltering runs. The shift, which lasts, on average, four years, typically starts when women reach their late 40s."

"higher risk for severe depressive symptoms. Bone loss accelerates. In women who have a genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease, the first plaques are thought to form"

"Women's Health Initiative, which remains the largest randomized clinical trial in history to involve only women, studying health outcomes for 160,000 postmenopausal women, some of them over the course of 15 years...one arm of the trial — in which women were given a combination of estrogen and progestin, a synthetic form of progesterone — had been stopped prematurely...a small but statistically significant increased risk of cardiac events, strokes and clots"

"A woman's risk of having breast cancer between the ages of 50 and 60 is around 2.33 percent. Increasing that risk by 26 percent would mean elevating it to 2.94 percent. (Smoking, by contrast, increases cancer risk by 2,600 percent.)"

"  wanted to be able to measure health outcomes — how many women ended up having strokes, heart attacks or cancer — but those ailments may not show up until women are in their 70s or 80s. The study was scheduled to run for only 8½ years. So they weighted the participants toward women who were already 60 or older. That choice meant that women in their 50s, who tended to be healthier and have more menopausal symptoms, were underrepresented in the study. "

" even after 20 years, the mortality rate of women who took those hormones was no higher than that of the control group...For healthy women in their 50s, life-threatening events like clots or stroke are rare, and so the increased risks from hormone therapy are also quite low."

" It was possible, researchers have hypothesized, that hormones may be most effective within a certain window"

" women who had more hot flashes — at least four a day — tended to have more signs of cardiovascular disease. "