Hormone Therapy May Up Risk of Dying of Lung Cancer

Last Updated: 2009-09-21 14:10:14 -0400 (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Among women who already have lung cancer, hormone replacement therapy - which has been tied to a higher risk of serious conditions including breast cancer and heart attacks - seems to increase the risk of death from the tumor, according to a new study.

Doctors once thought that hormone therapy, or HRT, could protect women from chronic diseases, especially heart disease. But use of the drugs plunged after 2002 when the large Women""s Health Initiative study found that HRT could raise the risk not only of breast and ovarian cancer, but of strokes and other serious conditions.

Dr. Rowan T. Chlebowski and colleagues looked at more than 16,500 women who were part of the Women""s Health Initiative: 8506 who received hormone replacement therapy (estrogen plus medroxyprogesterone), and 8102 who received placebo, or dummy pills.

During the period in which the researchers followed the women""s outcomes - an average of about 8 years -- 109 women in the hormone therapy group and 85 in the placebo group were diagnosed with lung cancer, Chlebowski, from Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Torrance, California, and colleagues note.

That was essentially the same rate of cancers, meaning that the treatment did not seem to affect whether a woman would develop cancer, and as a percentage, the risk of cancer was quite low, far below one percent.

However, lung cancer killed 73 women in the hormone therapy group, compared with 40 in the placebo group, the researchers report in The Lancet. Specifically, deaths were higher among women with a type of lung cancer called non-small-cell lung cancer, which is most common type.

"Today""s results and previous analyses on lung-cancer-related outcomes provide sufficient evidence to recommend discontinuation of hormone-replacement therapy once lung cancer is diagnosed," Dr. Apar Kishor Ganti, from the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, comments in a related editorial.

"Because the optimum safe duration of hormone-replacement therapy in terms of lung-cancer survival is unclear, such therapy should probably be avoided in women at high risk of developing lung cancer, especially those with a history of smoking," Dr. Ganti adds.

Source:

The Lancet, 2009.


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