And a study published last June in the New England Journal of Medicine did little to calm those fears. The study found that women who take hormone replacement therapy for 10 years reduce their risk of dying from all causes by 37 percent. The risk of dying from heart disease is cut by 57 percent, from breast cancer by 24 percent. But if a woman continues with hormone replacement therapy more than 10 years, the risk of death from breast cancer jumps to 43 percent. Still, most gynecologists, including Streicher, think the benefits outweigh the risks with estrogen replacement.
Most women die of heart disease.
Estrogen protects against heart disease. And if, in fact, we find that estrogen does somewhat increase the risk of breast cancer in a small population of women, I think that the studies really have shown that the protection against heart disease outweighs that. My view is very clearly that it s not worth the risk of breast cancer, and my particular reason for saying that is there are many safe alternatives for preventing heart disease and osteoporosis. There are products on the market, sometimes referred to as estrogen-light, that contain half as much estrogen as the standard dose. Estrotab, an estrogen synthesized from soy and yam sources, has been prescribed in doses of .3 milligrams, as opposed to the usual dose of .625 milligrams.