Menopause

Cessation of hormone therapy in menopausal women may result in sleep disturbances, according to a new study in Menopause. Since the hormone therapy has been associated with the alleviation of sleep problems in women experiencing menopausal symptoms, Dr Sarah E Tom, Interdisciplinary Women’s Health Research (IWHR) Scholar at the University of Texas Medical School, and colleagues sought to determine the resulting sleep effects during cessation of hormone therapy.

With the rate of diabetes and prediabetes/glucose intolerance increasing, it is imperative for clinicians to help reduce the risk of their patients developing full-blown diabetes as well as to help patients manage the illness.

Positive Association Between Mammographic Breast Density and Bone Mineral Density in thePostmenopausal Estrogen/Progestin Interventions Study

Five years ago this summer the National Institutes of Health’s stopped early a major portion of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), a large and ambitious study to address the most common causes of death, disability and impaired quality of life in postmenopausal women.

Recently there have been numerous references in the news about the new types of estrogens that do not cause an increased risk of breast cancer. While studies looking at an increased risk of breast cancer with traditional hormone replacement use still do not show a clear consensus, it is generally accepted that there may an increased, albeit small, risk of breast cancer with the use of traditional replacement hormones.

The HERS trial was the first study to put a damper on enthusiasm for hormone replacement therapy (HRT) as a preventive therapy for heart disease. A second trial called ERA (Estrogen Replacement and Atheriosclerosis trial), reported at the 49th Annual Meeting of the American College of Cardiology, held in Anaheim, California, March 12–15, 2000, provides additional evidence that HRT does not prevent heart disease.

Hysterectomy is one of the most common abdominal surgical procedures performed in women today with 600,000 hysterectomies in the USA annually, one in three women undergoing hysterectomy, and 6–20% in European countries.

The optimal surgical approach to treatment of stress urinary incontinence (SUI) in women continues to be a topic of controversy. This debate is fueled, in part, by the difficulty in comparing data on the different surgical procedures due to variations in patient selection, diagnostic methods, techniques, outcome criteria, and length of follow-up.

Interview with Steve Fleischman