You get used to outrageous medical claims in the press, but The Telegraph has truly surpassed itself today with its front page headline declaring that ‘HRT ‘is safe’ for postmenopausal women after all‘.
The article states that new research ‘has found no evidence that HRT is linked to any life-threatening condition’, and makes much of the fact that the new study followed women for a decade. There is a quote from Dr Lila Nachtigall, one of the study authors and a Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at New York University who claims that: ‘the risks of HRT have definitely been overstated. The benefits outweigh the risk.’
Prof John Studd from London is even more forthright, saying: ‘Most GPs are afraid of HRT – they will have learnt as medical students that it is linked to health risks. But those studies that were replicated in the textbooks were worthless. They collected the data all wrong.’
These are bold statements, and so you would expect them to be based on a significant piece of research. The main study that Prof Studd so comprehensively dismisses is the British Million Women study – over 1 million women were studied specifically to look at the risk of breast cancer with HRT and it found a small, but significant, increased risk. To overturn the findings of such a significant piece of research would require something big.
So what is this new research? Well the article, as is so often the case, fails to tell you – but if you are still reading as far as the 11th paragraph you may start to have your doubts: the study followed 80 women. 80! Not 800 000, or even 80 000, but 80! To be fair, when you look at the study itself it’s actually 136 – 80 women on HRT and 56 without. So with 1 084 110 women in the million women study and 136 in this new, apparently game-changing research – that’s 7971:1.
What’s more, when you look at the new study in detail (and here I’m grateful to Adam Jacobs on twitter who managed to locate it) the study was not designed to look at the safety of HRT – the intention of the research was to answer a question about the effects of HRT on body fat composition, and any findings on the safety of HRT were only a secondary consideration. What is more, it is described as a retrospective cohort study – that means it looked backwards at the history of these 80 women, so if a woman had got breast cancer related to HRT she might not have been alive to take part in the study in the first place.
Even if the study had been designed to prove there was no link between breast cancer and HRT, the Million Women study suggests an increase of only 5 extra breast cancers in 1000 women taking HRT for 10 years – so 80 women would only have 0.4 extra breast cancers between them – meaning the study is far too weak to draw any conclusions at all. Oh – and the study was sponsored by Pfizer, who might just have a commercial interest in lots more women going on HRT.
The Telegraph was not the only newspaper to pick up the story, but it was by far the worst reporting among the broadsheets – The Guardian, for instance, picked up the small number of women in the study and tried to bring a sense of balance to its piece – just so long as you read past the headline and the first two paragraphs.
In closing, I would like to say one or two things to Prof John Studd of Wimpole Street. The first is that if you are going to have an official website it would be best, for reasons of probity, if you could include an easy to find declaration of interests; maybe I am being dense, but I failed to find yours. Secondly, GPs are not afraid to prescribe HRT – and we have learnt one or two things since medical school – but we do like to prescribe it after having a discussion with the woman concerned about the balance of benefits versus risk, as we like to base this on reliable evidence.
And for a woman considering HRT wondering what all this means? HRT remains the best way to control symptoms of the menopause, which can be very distressing. There is an increased risk of some cancers, but it really is quite small and many woman feel it is well worth taking that risk in order to feel well; have a chat with your GP about it.
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