Menopause hormone therapy and your heart

Are you taking or considering hormone therapy to treat bothersome menopause symptoms? Understand potential risks to your heart and whether hormone therapy is right for you.

Long-term hormone replacement therapy used to be routinely prescribed for postmenopausal women to relieve hot flashes and other menopause symptoms. Hormone replacement therapy was also thought to reduce the risk of heart disease.

Before menopause, women have a lower risk of heart disease than men do. But as women age, and their estrogen levels decline after menopause, their risk of heart disease increases. In the 1980s and 1990s, experts advised older women to take estrogen and other hormones to keep their hearts healthy.

However, hormone replacement therapy or menopause hormone therapy, as it's now called has had mixed results. Many of the hoped-for benefits failed to materialize for large numbers of women. The largest randomized, controlled trial to date actually found a small increase in heart disease in postmenopausal women using combined (both estrogen and progestin) hormone therapy. For women in this study using estrogen alone, there was no increased risk in heart disease.

Other studies suggest that hormone therapy, especially estrogen alone, may not affect or may even decrease the risk of heart disease when taken early in postmenopausal years. However, these studies can be confusing to interpret into practice, since study outcomes can be affected by many factors, such as the ages of the study participants, the time elapsed since menopause and the duration of hormone therapy use. Continued research will help doctors more clearly understand the relationship between menopause hormone therapy and heart disease.

If you're having a tough time with symptoms of menopause but worry about how hormone therapy will affect your heart, talk with your doctor to put your personal risk into perspective. Consider these points:

Menopause hormone therapy risks may vary depending on:

If you've already had a heart attack, menopause hormone therapy is not for you. If you already have heart disease or you have a history of blood clots, the risks of hormone therapy have been clearly shown to outweigh any potential benefits.

Talk with your doctor about these strategies to reduce the risks of menopause hormone therapy:

Women of all ages should take heart disease seriously. Among U.S. women, nearly 1 in 3 deaths each year is due to heart and blood vessel (cardiovascular) disease.

Most healthy women who are within five years of menopause can safely take short-term hormone therapy for menopausal symptoms without significantly increasing the risk of heart disease. If you experience classic menopausal symptoms, including intolerable hot flashes, vaginal dryness or insomnia, talk to your doctor about how you can relieve troublesome symptoms without putting your health at risk.

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See the article here:
Menopause hormone therapy and your heart - Mayo Clinic

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