Hormone therapy fails to slow heart disease in older women, study finds

March 13, 2000
Web posted at: 5:07 p.m. EST (2207 GMT)

From staff reports

LOS ANGELES (CNN) -- Hormone-replacement therapy, widely believed to be an effective treatment for heart ailments in older women, does not appreciably slow progression of cardiac disease, reseachers at Wake Forest University have found.

"The message for women and their physicians is to make full use of proven therapies such as cholesterol-lowering drugs and not assume that HRT (hormone replacement therapy) is an effective alternative for treatment of heart disease," said Dr. David Herrington of the university's Baptist Medical Center.

In reporting the study on Monday to members of the American College of Cardiology during a meeting in California, Herrington said 309 women with heart disease were randomly assigned to take an estrogen supplement called Premarin, estrogen combined with progestin (Prempro) or a placebo.

Using injected dye to measure progressive restrictions in the women's arteries, the reseachers saw "no differences between the groups in how quickly the disease progressed," said Herrington. "HRT did lower cholesterol, but these changes didn't translate into a measurable benefit in the arteries of the heart." The study lasted about three years.

The research, funded by the National Institutes of Health, is the second major clinical study that questions whether hormone-replacement therapy is effective against heart disease. In 1998, the Heart and Estrogen/Progestin Replacement Study of 2,763 women who took the hormones for four years had just as many heart attacks as women who didn't take the treatment.

Other researchers are seeking to determine the relationship between hormone therapy and heart disease among younger, healthier women.

Dr. Trudy Bush of the University of Maryland said whether estrogen can prevent or reduce heart disease among healthy women remains unanswered.

"We need to remember that heart disease is a chronic disease," Bush said. "It's a long-term disease so we can't expect giving women estrogens who already have heart disease to immediately have benefit."

CNN Medical Correspondent Rhonda Rowland contributed to this report.

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American College of Cardiology
Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center
The Heart -- An Online Exploration
National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute

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