General Health

Now let’s look at the numbers for heart disease from that same report. Estrogen replacement therapy cuts that same 50-year-old woman’s risk of heart disease from 46.1% to 34.2%. Since the risk of heart disease is so great to begin with, this reduction is important and could save many lives. Some say the reduction in heart disease risk with estrogen therapy is even greater than these numbers indicate (perhaps as much as 50%!), but at this point there is no solid proof But before you get too excited, consider this: if you add progesterone to the hormone therapy, which many do (for reasons to be discussed below), the heart disease benefits are blunted. By how much, no one knows for sure. All we do know is that some of the benefits that estrogen confers on heart health, such as reducing cholesterol, are partially negated by progesterone. The PEPI study mentioned earlier suggests that the negative impact of progesterone on heart disease risk is quite small, however and that when natural progesterone is used instead of a synthetic form, the cardiovascular benefits are almost as good as with estrogen alone.

*414/162/1*

General health