ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, November 6, 1996 TAG: 9611060055
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHICAGO
SOURCE: Associated Press
Two new studies confirm that taking hormones after menopause can strengthen women's bones, perhaps heading off fractures in old age, researchers say.
A third study in today's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association found that older women with the strongest bones appear to have the highest risk of breast cancer. That finding may raise suspicions that estrogen supplements promote cancer, but outside experts quickly cautioned against that assumption.
Previous studies on the estrogen-breast cancer question yielded conflicting results and have suggested that any increased risk is slight.
``I would not recommend that women taking estrogen for osteoporosis even consider stopping their therapy,'' said Dr. Karl Insogna, director of the Yale Bone Center in New Haven, Conn. He was not associated with any of the studies.
Insogna noted that estrogen is only one factor influencing bone density. ``There are many other factors, such as exercise, race, calcium intake, other things that we don't know,'' he said.
Older women stop producing estrogen and take artificial hormones to counter symptoms of menopause such as hot flashes and vaginal dryness.
Estrogen encourages the uterus lining to thicken, as if it were soon to receive a fertilized egg, and progestins make the extra cells slough off if the egg doesn't arrive. The sloughing off is important in preventing uterine cancer, which estrogen promotes if taken alone.
In one of the studies on hormones and bones, postmenopausal women who took estrogen alone or with either of two types of progestins gained 5 percent bone mass in their spines and 1.7 percent in their hips over three years.
The women who took placebos lost an average of 1.8 percent of spinal bone mass and 1.7 percent of hip bone mass, said the researchers, led by epidemiologist Irma L. Mebane-Sims, who then worked for the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and now is an independent consultant.
Other studies have also showed an increase in bone mass in older women taking estrogen, so the new work ``is reassuring but not surprising,'' Insogna said.
In a second study, researchers tested an experimental combination of types of estrogen and progestin commonly used only in birth-control pills, and it, too, proved successful in building bone mass, said researchers led by Dr. Leon Speroff of Oregon Health Sciences University.
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