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Genevieve Neal-Perry

Professor

Sep 17, 2026

10:47
Genevieve, can you give me a sort of short version of why it was taboo and what's changed in the last couple years?
10:55
Ooh, that, that's...
10:57
You, you asked for a lot there.
10:58
[laughs] So, you know, the Women's Health Initiative, the WHI study, was a really important study, and it was designed to help us understand whether estrogen hormone therapy was associated with breast cancer, whether we had improvement in terms of neurocognition, and whether we, um, had a heart benefit.
11:23
And it was designed to look at women who were older, right? And it did what it was intended to do in terms of the study, and we, you know, we found that it wasn't cardio protective because for many years women were told even if you, you know, you've been menopausal for 15 years, you should start estrogen because it's, it's, um, cardio protective.
11:44
So it found that that wasn't the case and, you know, we found that, um-
11:51
Yeah.
11:51
And it wasn't helping cognition in, in older women and, you know, and there was an inc- uh, an increased risk for, um, breast cancer, which by the way, was not the first time this was demonstrated.

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