WASHINGTON (AP) — Ladies typically use hormone remedy to alleviate scorching flashes and different menopause signs — and new analysis suggests patches or lotions could also be safer for his or her blood stress than tablets.
As ladies’s our bodies produce decrease ranges of reproductive hormones throughout menopause their danger for coronary heart illness rises. Hypertension additional will increase that danger — but it surely’s not clear whether or not there’s a hyperlink with hormone remedy for menopause signs.
Canadian researchers puzzled if the best way hormones are absorbed — orally, vaginally or by way of the pores and skin — may play a job.
The College of Calgary workforce examined well being data of greater than 112,000 ladies ages 45 and older who stuffed prescriptions for no less than six months’ price of estrogen-only hormone remedy between 2008 and 2019. They tracked which ladies went on to develop hypertension no less than a yr after beginning remedy.
Whereas the variations weren’t large, ladies who took estrogen tablets had a 14% greater danger of creating hypertension in comparison with these utilizing pores and skin patches or lotions, the researchers reported Monday. Oral estrogen carried a 19% higher danger than vaginal variations.
The findings have been revealed within the journal Hypertension.
Hormone remedy has a mixture of dangers and advantages that imply it’s not for everybody. Right now it’s prescribed to not forestall illness however to alleviate menopause-related signs — usually utilizing the bottom attainable dose for the shortest time. Mostly used are mixture tablets of estrogen and one other hormone, progestin. (Estrogen-only tablets sometimes are prescribed to ladies with out a uterus.)
Totally different variations of hormone remedy may fit higher for various menopause signs, one thing the examine didn’t deal with.
But it surely provides necessary clues to understanding the advanced relationship between hormone remedy and blood stress, stated Dr. Garima Sharma, a ladies’s coronary heart specialist with Virginia’s Inova Well being System and the American Coronary heart Affiliation.
Sharma want to see a extra rigorous trial that compares completely different hormone variations. However she pointed to a attainable organic rationalization: Perhaps oral estrogen impacts enzymes linked to blood stress because it’s being processed, whereas pores and skin and vaginal variations have far more restricted exercise within the physique.
Nonetheless, “these findings are very clinically related,” Sharma stated in an an electronic mail, and counsel it’s particularly necessary to observe blood stress in ladies who use oral hormone remedy.
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