For example, in a segment of the ongoing Nurses Health Study published last year, women who took hormones had a lower overall mortality rate than nonusers. But after 10 years, this improved life expectancy began to be partially offset by increasing deaths from breast cancer. How significant this increased cancer risk is depends on your individual risk factors. If you stop taking hormone therapy after 10 years, risk for breast cancer begins to drop. Five years after stopping, your risk returns to what it would have been without hormone therapy.
Heart disease kills more American and Canadian women every year than all cancers combined.
If you are trying to sort out your chances of dying of a heart attack versus breast cancer, remember that the incidence of heart disease among women age 45 to 54 is similar to that of breast cancer, but with increasing age heart disease becomes far more prevalent. Deaths from heart disease exceed those from breast cancer at all ages over 45. Nor is breast cancer a necessarily fatal disease. But even though heart disease looms larger as a cause of death, women fear breast cancer so much that many are unwilling to do anything that might increase their risk. Both ERT and HRT can prevent osteoporosis and fractures for as long as you take the hormones.