The Women's Health Initiative - How One Study Changed HRT for Women

So you might not know that HRT has been around for a really long time.

We are talking 60s and 70s.

Estrogen was being prescribed for women.

Yes.

Back in the 60s and 70s, it was actually the fifth most common prescription through the 80s and even into the early 90s for women.

The fifth most common prescription.

It was extremely common.

At that time, in the early 90s, when it kind of peaked, there were upwards of 18 million women filling prescriptions for HRT.

All right, specifically for estrogen.

18 million.

So this is not new.

But let me tell you what happened.

So in the mid 90s, the NIH, that's the National Institute for Health, funded and started a study that they called the Women's Health Initiative.

And this was put into place with very good intentions.

They were wanting to do a long-term randomized controlled trial.

So those are all good words in the science world, all right? These are the kind of trials we want.

They were looking to do a long-term randomized controlled trial That showed long-term outcomes for women who are on HRT in the areas of heart disease and specifically heart disease, and then other illnesses as well, such as stroke, breast cancer, and a few others.

So this was put into place, again, in the mid-90s.

looking at long-term outcomes for women, specifically for heart disease, but again, it included a few other of those diseases as well, and what the results of long-term use of HRT was going to do in those areas, all right? What happened was in the early 2000s, 2002 specifically, the study was stopped.

All right, so the NIH and the people who were conducting the study stopped the study.

They had concluded that the health risks of continuing outweighed the benefits, so it was called off.

And this happens in studies.

Just about any scientific study is going to have some kind of kind of boundary line that they say hey at some point especially if humans are involved at some point we're going to have to call this off if we reach this threshold like if if our results show this threshold we're going to have to call off the study and that is what happened so they were following their own levels they called off the study this is why it is because The estrogen group, a specific group, and I'm going to go back and tell you what the groups were, but a specific group showed that the chance of breast cancer appeared to increase at the five-year mark.

So five years into the study happening, the researchers, the conductors of the study called it off, said we are stopping this because we are seeing at the five-year mark a statistical increase in breast cancer diagnoses.

So let me go back and tell you what the groups were in the study, and then I'm going to come back to this, okay, and tell you what happened at this point.