One percent of women  of the 27,000 women aged 50 to 79 in the WHI  HRT trials now have been shown to have  heart attacks, strokes, blood clots and death within the first two years of this trial. It has been stated from this study that the women taking HRT had a "small increase" of these incidents over those not taking HRT.

This of course means that women who were not on HRT also had heart attacks, strokes, blood clots and/or died. But critical in this finding of early death and serious disease is that this is from the SHORT TERM use of HRT, not the long term use which other studies have implicated in linking HRT to breast cancer.

Missing from these early media reports is the exact numbers of how many women who were taking HRT make up this "small increase" over the non-HRT takers.  But regardless, even this preliminary finding demands a total reassessment of the current risk-benefit analysis when offering healthy women HRT. If an early increased HRT risk is death, and serious disease, then it should be offered only when the risk to not offer HRT leads to an equally  confirmed risk of death and serious disease.

One now needs to rethink the impact of "menopause" signs  on a woman's life and be sure to sort out and eliminate those signs that are clearly showing up as gender non-specific midlife "signs" and not continue risking the  use of  HRT to "treat" those.

If a woman genuinely has no other negative life context issues, and appears suicidally depressed due to her confirmed hormonal "menopause" signs after competent screening for all other alternatives, then risking the use of experimental HRT may be a fair trade-off.

If a woman has serious life-threatening emergency bleeding where the only viable alternative left is a hysterectomy, then the use of hormone drugs may be a better risk benefit solution.

However, is just the occasional experience of hot flashes, short bouts of insomnia (midlife issue, not menopause issue), fuzzy memory (midlife issue, not a menopause issue), when a risk of even SHORT TERM HRT drugs is now death, what exactly supports the "benefits" of HRT?

  All physicians need to rethink "First do no harm" when they suggest the use of HRT to healthy midlife women. If a short-term risk is now death, what in fact are the "benefits" which justify continuing to both encourage and scare healthy women into taking these drugs?
J

...The findings are startling because most of the study's 27,000 participants do not have heart disease --and because a major goal of the multimillion-dollar study, the Women's Health Initiative, is to determine whether older women can protect their hearts by taking hormones.... 

From the LA Times story
          ...In a surprising reversal of prevailing medical wisdom, researchers conducting a nationwide study of women's hormone replacement therapy have warned subjects taking estrogen that they are slightly more likely to have heart attacks, strokes or blood clots during the first two years of use.  Researchers have long assumed that estrogen helps protect  women from cardiovascular problems. But  the new findings appear  to cast doubt on that assumption...... 

Official update - the letter mentioned above