Now, information from a huge study in Britain suggests that the women thought to be at the lowest risk from hormones may actually be at the highest risk, at least when it comes to breast cancer. The study found that women with the greatest risk of breast cancer from hormones were those who took them earliest — before or soon after menopause began.
The new findings, published on Friday in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, are not the strongest type of evidence: They do not come from a randomized trial, an experiment in which people are picked at random to take either a drug or a placebo and are then studied and compared over time. Instead, the British study was observational, meaning that the women being studied had made their own decisions about whether and when to take hormones. There is always a chance, in observational studies, that there is some underlying difference between people who choose to take drugs and those who do not, and that the difference — not just the drugs they took — may help account for different health outcomes. Observational findings are sometimes disproved by randomized trials.
Whole article here: Hormones Early in Menopause Are Linked to Higher Breast Cancer Risk – NYTimes.com.
