HRT and cancer (what’s the salt angle?)
Several years ago, the massive Women’s Health Initiative examined the health outcomes of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) where post-menopausal women received supplemental estrogen. “Everyone” knew it was safe and it made logical sense: after menopause, women didn’t produce estrogen so, “of course,” replacing the hormone would make them healthier and live longer lives.
Only it didn’t.
Results of the trial showed clearly that many women died from the treatment. Surprise. The embarrassed NIH quickly shut off that portion of the trial and doctors were warned that what “everyone” knew was the right treatment regime was, in fact, endangering the lives of their patients.
The Salt Institute has cited the incident as a “learning experience” for public health policy-makers: that sometimes the most obvious and popular health nostrum turns a cropper so prudence dictates reserving population health interventions to those that have been tested in controlled trials. HRT never had been tested before it was rushed into practice. “People are dying. We can’t wait,” cried advocates.
Well it’s happened again. Same study. Different health outcome. A study published in the New England Medical Journal February 5 found increased incidence of breast cancer in HRT-treated women “suggesting a cause-and-effect relation between hormone treatment and breast cancer.”
Coming close on the heels of two studies done in Italy that found Coronary Heart Failure patients receiving salt-reduced diets (because for the past century “everyone knew” they work or at least cause no harm) suffered massively greater mortality than those on regular salt diets, the new HRT study drives home the point made repeatedly by the Salt Institute: we need a controlled trial of the health outcomes of low-salt diets. We should not ask the population to be the guinea pigs as we did the women in the Women’s Health Initiative.
