06 December 2005

Have a HeaRT

Alyssa Burns-Hill, MSc, FRSH, MIHPE
Hormonal Health Expert for Complementary Medical Association.  Health Specialist at Bio Vitality Limited www.bio-vitality.com

Today’s news (06.12.05) in the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and the Daily Mail and the Daily Express reporting on a new study from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Centre (North Carolina, USA), I believe is a most appalling display of the medical model at its most reductionist!

This research was conducted by Professor Jay Kaplan and used monkeys to find out if female monkeys that had low oestrogen levels before menopause had a higher risk for developing heart disease than those who had higher oestrogen levels. 

It is mere conjecture, of course, that the purpose of this new study is to try to find a ‘new niche’ for the ailing sales of HRT through another avenue of fear.

HRT has been shown to be a significant risk enhancer for women’s health as follows:

HRT for longer than 5 years doubles risk of breast cancer. Risk higher if oestrogen plus progestins. New England Journal of Medicine, 1989
HRT for 5 or more years increases breast cancer risk by 71%. The risk is higher if oestrogen plus progestins. New England Journal of Medicine, 1995
Ovarian cancer risk is 72% higher on oestrogen HRT. American Journal of Epidemology, 1995
HRT doubles risk of invasive breast cancer and death in a million women study. ‘Use of HRT over the past decade has resulted in an estimated 20,000 extra breast cancers.’ Lancet, 2003
Now ‘they’, it seems may want to use HRT prophylactically to prevent/reduce the risk of women’s heart disease?

Let’s conveniently forget about obesity, depression or smoking, for example, as being factors that will adversely affect heart health! Let us also remember that there are a couple of US trials that are actually based on the human model.  The Heart and Estrogen/progestin Replacement Study found no effect after 4.1 years (JAMA, 1998) and the Estrogen Replacement and Atherosclerosis Trial looked at the progression of existing disease found no effect from oestrogen or from a oestrogen/progestin pill. (N Engl J Med, 2000).Are we also conveniently failing to remember that the Women’s Health Initiative Study was halted in July 2002 and that one of the initial findings for women taking synthetic combination HRT showed an increase of heart disease (as well as breast cancer, stroke and blood clots).  The study even projected seven more heart disease events for women on HRT compared with placebo or taking nothing!  (Combined oestrogen and progestin HRT for 5 years increases the risk of invasive breast cancer by 26%, strokes by 41% and heart disease by 22%.  Journal of American Medical Association, 2002)

The 2005 British Heart Foundation statistics indicate that 7.4% of the adult male population is living with coronary heart disease.  Women’s figures actually make marginally better reading, at 4.5% of the adult female population. So it seems that a woman’s hormones are to blame when it comes to her physical state of health outside of her womb and ovaries.  Well, that’s a revelation! 

… so what causes the even bigger problem for the opposite sex, could that be hormonal too or has it got more to do with obesity, depression and smoking, for example?
There are, after all, a number of factors that will dictate one’s risk of coronary heart disease and if we really want to focus on oestrogen deficiency as one of them obesity might be a good thing in heart health because fatter women actually produce more oestrogen for themselves than thinner ones.  The more body fat you have the higher your oestrogen levels!  (Obesity by the way is not a healthy option in the pursuit of heart health or, indeed, any kind of health!)
We tend to forget that health is a complex subject and reducing it down to single common denominators is so very reductionist that, dare I suggest, perhaps it has no relevance to the whole.

Post Script:  Yes, this is a piece of rather incensed writing, I do hope you will excuse me you see I’m a woman and apt to being a little ‘hormonal’.

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