Thrombosis HRT & Epilepsy

Thrombosis, HRT & Epilepsy

http://www.healthsentinel.com/org_news.php?event=org_news_print_list_…

Roman Bystrianyk, “Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) increases seizure
risk in women with epilepsy”, Health Sentinel, September 24, 2007,

Hormone Replacement Therapy, or HRT, is a medical treatment for women
who have reached or passed menopause. HRT involves taking small doses
of hormones – estrogen and/or progesterone. Prempro is a medication
that combines conjugated equine estrogens plus medroxyprogerstone
acetate also known as CEE/MPA. The conjugated estrogens are obtained
from the urine of pregnant mares and progestin part of Prempro is the
synthetic form of the hormone progesterone.

HRT was once hailed as the drug that would ease a woman through
menopause while protecting the heart. However, despite these hopes
numerous studies have shown that HRT causes a large number of serious
problems including the increased risk of stroke, heart disease, breast
cancer, endometrial cancer, ovarian cancer, deep-venous thrombosis,
and gallbladder disease. The International Agency for Research on
Cancer, which is the World Health Organization’s (WHO) cancer research
group classifies both birth control pills and HRT as “carcinogenic to
humans”.

A large study published in the Journal of the American Medical
Association in August of 1998 showed that HRT provided no benefit in
coronary heart disease but did increase the risk of venous
thromboembolic events and gallbladder disease.

A study called the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) enrolled over
160,000 women from 40 different medical centers. The purpose of the
study was to examine the health benefits and risks of HRT. In July
2002, the study that involved the use of HRT was stopped mainly
because of the detected 26% increased risk in breast cancer.

In 2004, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical
Association, found that women aged 60 to 69 were 4.3 times more likely
to develop a clot if taking combined HRT, while women in their
seventies were at 7.5 times the risk.

In 2005, academics at the University of Nottingham released their
findings after a major review of 28 clinical trials involving nearly
40,000 patients on HRT. The team concluded that HRT, which is taken by
1.7 million women in the United Kingdom, increased the risk of stroke
by 29%.

Dr Edith Weisberg, chairwoman of the National Health and Medical
Research Council’s HRT working party, stated that in a group of 1000
women aged 30 there would be only one extra case of breast cancer, and
that for women taking HRT for five years or more the risk of breast
cancer is four extra cases for every 1000 women.

In April 2007 a report in the New Zealand Herald reported that the
world’s largest study on HRT showed that it may have caused 1,000
deaths from ovarian cancer in Britain between 1991 and 2005. Previous
results from the same study showed that HRT increased the risk of
breast and endometrial cancers. Overall, the incidence of these three
common cancers is increased by 63 per cent among women currently
taking HRT compared with those who have never taken it.

Shockingly, in 2005 the Daily Mail reported on the writings of U.S.
researchers published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community
Health on the history of HRT. The researchers outline the results of a
meeting of historians, biologists, and women’s health advocates to
discuss the recent reaction to the recent HRT studies and noted that
the cancer-causing potential of the sex hormones used in hormone
replacement therapy has been known since the 1930s.

The researchers said the question that needed to be answered was “Why,
for four decades, since the mid-1960s, were millions of women
prescribed powerful pharmacological agents already shown, three
decades earlier, to be carcinogenic?” According the article, the
researchers questioned why repeated warnings were ignored and not
translated into health policies to protect women. They suggested that
the pharmaceutical industry, doctors and researchers “colluded” to
promote the view that the menopause was a “deficiency disease” and
women needed long-term HRT to “prevent illness, loss of sexuality and
ugly ageing”.

In 2006, the Globe and Mail reported on a study that was published in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that linked HRT to
hearing loss. The research found problems in the inner ear and in some
measures of brain function affecting hearing in women using hormone
therapy with progestin.

Now adding to the list of negative consequences a recent study in the
journal Epilepsia shows that HRT increases the frequency of seizures
in postmenopausal women. The authors performed a randomized, double-
blind, placebo-controlled study in postmenopausal women with epilepsy.

The study notes, “For postmenopausal women with epilepsy, hormone
replacement therapy (HRT) presents another potential source or
hormonal influences on seizure activity. One survey suggests that it
may exacerbate seizures. This would seem plausible, given that
estrogen in proconvulsant in several animal models.”

The study found, “the association of increased seizure frequency with
increasing CEE/MPA dose was significant for an increase in seizure
frequency of any seizure type after HRT treatment.”

The authors do offer a suggestion that a possibly safer HRT treatment
would be with the use of natural progesterone. “Statistically
significant findings in open-label investigations suggest that natural
progesterone supplement may reduce the seizure frequency in women with
catamenial [of or relating to menstruation] epilepsy.

SOURCE: Epilepsia, September 2006