Breast Cancer Decline: Where Credit is Due

March 26th, 2009 · 7:37 AM

Study Credits 2002 Warning on Hormone Replacement Drugs

Breast cancer rates prior to 2002 were 210,000 per year, reports the Wall Street Journal, with a drop to 190,000 per year after 2002. In the year 2002, the Women’s Health Initiative sponsored by NIH halted the study of Wyeth’s drug Prempro because it caused an increase in breast cancer and vascular disease (increased heart attacks and stroke). This was the only risk factor that was identified to account for this change.

My comments: For MANY years prior to 2002, physicians in the alternative medicine field were unitedly talking about the increased risk of breast cancer in women on HRT (hormone replacement therapy) after menopause. Here’s what happens and the reasons behind it: In order for a drug company to patent a drug, it cannot be ‘natural’, or else it can’t be patented. So pharmaceutical companies add a chemical group to the natural compound, test it for ‘usefulness’ and ’safety,’ and release their changed, patented drug after FDA approval. Unfortunately, in the HRT arena, it was difficult to tease out ‘natural’ bioidentical progesterone from ‘chemically altered’ progestin (because they were both called progesterone). So now there is a dilemma about what’s what. As a general rule—bioidentical products (that are chemically identical to what the body makes) will always be safer than chemically altered products. The body has the metabolic network to utililze or break down ‘natural’ substances, while it may not know how to handle ‘chemically altered’ material.

Tags: bioidentical hormones, breast cancer, hormone replacement therapy, hormones, HRT, pharmaceutical companies, progesterone, progestin

1 response so far ↓

1 Tammie // Mar 27, 2009 at 2:02 pm

I hope women will think twice before going on HTR! Or even three or four times.