Thanks! Nice to see a balanced article.
Excerpt:
... with recent publicity around the benefits of HRT from celebrity advocates such as Davina McCall, some experts feel that the pendulum is now starting to swing too far in the opposite direction.
“I’m now seeing women who often have significant health problems, who are being led to believe that HRT will miraculously cure them,” says Briggs. “Some of that is coming from celebrities who often have a very different lifestyle from the patients I’m dealing with.”
She is anxious that the overprescribing of hormone therapies could trigger the same sort of crash as the publication of the WHI study did in 2002. She says: “I think there’s a lot of us who are feeling very uncomfortable – largely around very high [hormone] doses being used, lack of progestogens, testosterone by the shedload. Of course, HRT might be appropriate, but it might not be.”
But pills and procedures are only part of the solution. “Menopause is a natural life stage for the majority of women, and it needs to be embraced and managed, rather than treated as a disease,” says Irene Aninye, director of science programmes at the Society for Women’s Health Research, which recently recommended preparing women early (as young as 35) for better health during the menopause transition and beyond. “This transition is different for everybody, and how your body responds to it is affected by your overall health and any specific conditions you may have,” Aninye says. A woman who is overweight or unfit is likely to gain more from healthy eating and exercise than taking hormones. Eating a healthy diet and taking regular exercise will also help guard against the longer term consequences of low oestrogen, such as cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis.
“What is needed,” says Briggs, “is a situation where menopause is talked about so that people know what’s likely to come, and they can make informed decisions about how they want to manage that part of their life.”
