Hormones can raise breast cancer risk
Thursday, April 19, 2007

Research on two continents signaled more bad news for menopause hormones, offering the strongest evidence yet that they can raise the risk of breast cancer and are tied to a slightly higher risk of ovarian cancer.

New U.S. government numbers showed that breast cancer rates leveled off in 2004 after plunging in 2003 – the year after millions of women stopped taking hormones because a big study tied them to higher heart, stroke and breast cancer risks. Experts said the leveling off shows that the 2003 drop in the cancer rate was real and not a fluke.

From 2001 to 2004, breast cancer rates fell almost 9 percent – a dramatic decline, researchers report in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. The trend was even stronger for the most common form of the disease – tumors whose growth is fueled by hormones. Those rates fell almost 15 percent among women ages 50 to 69, the group most likely to have been on hormone pills. the rest