Hormone Therapy during Menopause Raises Breast Cancer Risk for Years

A sweeping new analysis adds to the evidence that many women who take hormone therapy during menopause are more likely to develop breast cancer—and remain at higher risk of cancer for more than a decade after they stop taking the drugs.

The study, published Thursday in the Lancet, looked at data from dozens of studies, including long-term data on more than 100,000 women who developed breast cancer after menopause. Half of those women had used what’s known as menopausal hormone therapy, or MHT. The longer women took the medicine, the more likely they were to develop breast cancer. Experts say the findings could shape how women and their health care providers decide how to manage symptoms of menopause.

“This is a consensus of many researchers and many studies all around the world. These are important new results,” said said Valerie Beral, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Oxford and one of the lead authors of the new study.

Read more from Scientific America, by Megan Thielking, on Hormone Therapy during Menopause Raises Breast Cancer Risk for Years

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