Hormone replacement therapy to ease menopause symptoms doesn’t increase a woman’s risk of brain tumors.
Researchers found no link between hormone therapy and gliomas, the most common brain tumors in adults, according to results of a new study published recently in the journal Menopause.
“Compared with nonusers, users of hormone therapy were not significantly associated with glioma risk,” a team led by senior researcher Dr. Hui Tang, a neurosurgeon with North Sichuan Medical College in Nanchong, China, wrote.
No link was found even when researchers considered how long a woman had been taking hormone therapy, and whether she was currently using it.
“Although there is a known sex difference in the incidence of gliomas, with women being six times more likely to develop the disease compared with men, there does not appear to be an association between glioma and hormone therapy use in postmenopausal women,” Dr. Stephanie Faubion, medical director for The Menopause Society, said in a news release.
Hormone therapy is prescribed to treat common menopause symptoms like hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings and vaginal problems, researchers mentioned in background notes.
The therapy had been widely used until 2002, when early clinical trial results showed an association between hormone therapy and increased risk of breast cancer, heart disease, stroke and blood clots.
Since then, further study has shown that hormone therapy is indeed safe for treatment of menopause symptoms, but is unlikely to decrease risk for age-related health problems like heart disease or hip fractures.
This new study set out to check one of the remaining concerns about hormone therapy and how it might increase risk of brain cancer in women.
Some experts had speculated that women’s naturally higher risk of glioma might be linked to female hormones like estrogen.
For this study, researchers analyzed data from more than 75,000 women between 50 and 78 years of age participating in a long-term cancer screening study. The women were tracked for an average 12 years.
The results found that women using hormone therapy had no increased risk of gliomas, even if they’d been taking it for a while.
But researchers said their findings should be verified in larger studies with more extended follow-up periods.