The Great Hormone Therapy Comeback

Why addressing menopause's side effects and symptoms will benefit your health for years to come.

- Sarah Elizabeth Richards

JoAnn Pinkerton, MD, an obstetrician-gynecologist, had just settled into her afternoon routine of seeing patients at the University of Virginia Health Center in July 2002 when a nurse told her that several people had worriedly called to ask if their hormone therapy (HT) was still safe. A new study was all over the news, and it threatened to shake the foundation of the only treatment known to tame the anxiety, hot flashes, and night sweats of pre- and postmenopausal women.

Dr. Pinkerton rushed home and turned on CNN. Her stomach dropped when she read the “breaking news” ticker scrolling across the screen: The government had halted a major Women's Health Initiative study that was following roughly 17,000 postmenopausal women across the country, ages 50 to 79, for five to eight years while they underwent HT.

The investigators found some scary stats: a 29 percent increase in heart attacks, a 41 percent increase in strokes, and a small increased chance of breast cancer.

But the headlines didn’t sound right. Dr. Pinkerton had been treating menopausal women for two decades and had founded the first menopause clinic at her university 15 years earlier. “I knew the results were exaggerated, because this wasn’t what we were seeing with the women we were taking care of,” she says.

She worried that her patients, and women all over the country, would be alarmed by the news and stop the therapy that could significantly improve their quality of life—helping them sleep, boosting their mood and sex lives, and staving off bone density loss. (Spoiler: That's exactly what happened.)