The latest medical headlines have shocked women across the country: The government has just halted a major study of hormone-replacement therapy (HRT) involving the Wyeth company's Prempro three years earlier than planned because they've determined the health risks far outweigh the benefits.
But I breathed a little easier. I stopped taking Wyeth's Premarin, the most widely prescribed estrogen drug on the market, years ago.
Researchers put an end to the massive Women's Health Initiative Prempro study, which involved more than 16,000 women across the country and was scheduled to run for eight years, after concluding that hormone-replacement therapy raises the risk of strokes by 41 percent, heart attacks by 29 percent and breast cancer by 26 percent. Dr. Claude Lenfant, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which sponsored the study, said the cardiovascular and cancer risks were "too high a price to pay” and urged women who turn to HRT to ward off heart disease to "focus on well-proven treatments" instead, such as controlling blood cholesterol and keeping their weight down.
In an editorial on the new HRT findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Drs. Suzanne Fletcher and Graham Colditz of Harvard Medical School concluded, "The whole purpose of healthy women taking long-term estrogen/progestin therapy is to preserve health and prevent disease. The results of this study provide strong evidence that the opposite is happening."
This latest bad news about HRT really shouldn't surprise anyone in the medical community. Two years ago, researchers warned Women's Health Initiative participants that women taking HRT suffered more heart attacks, strokes and blood clots in the lungs during the first two years of use than did women taking a placebo.
But I didn't stop taking Premarin for my health. I told my doctor "no more" because I love animals.
Premarin and Prempro (an estrogen/progestin combination) contain a nasty secret ingredient: animal suffering. As unbelievable as it sounds, these drugs are made from the urine of pregnant horses. To collect the urine, farmers in the United States and Canada confine tens of thousands of mares to tiny stalls for six months at a time. Some horses are allowed to run and stretch their limbs every few weeks, but most don't see the light of day for months. The mares wear cumbersome urine-collection bags, which chafe their legs and prevent them from ever lying down comfortably.
Most of the foals born on pregnant mares' urine farms are taken from their mothers soon after birth, fattened, then slaughtered for meat that is sold to Europe. One farmer told Philadelphia magazine, "We have no choice. We can't afford to keep up the foals during the winter, and there's not enough of a market for the little ones."
When I learned how horses suffer to make Premarin (and Prempro), I stopped taking it at once. Now the halting of the study shows that what's bad for horses is bad for people, too.
If you're taking hormone drugs and have concerns, I have some good news for you. Many women find they can control their menopausal symptoms by making easy lifestyle changes, like eating a low-fat vegetarian diet and getting regular exercise. Best of all, taking these simple steps will also help protect you from the serious diseases — heart disease and osteoporosis — that doctors once thought HRT would prevent.
Isn't it funny: So many times something we initially do to help animals — such as giving up meat or finding natural ways to cope with the symptoms of menopause — ends up helping us, too.
