Estrogen-Only Hormone Therapy Is Safer Than Previously Thought
A new study suggests that hormone therapy for menopausal women—long thought to be linked to health risks, particularly stroke—might not be so dangerous, at least in the case of women who have had hysterectomies. The Los Angeles Times is reporting that according to the Women’s Health Initiative, long periods of estrogen-only therapy can sometimes be appropriate:
Although many women have sworn off hormone therapy, a new analysis from the clinical trial that first unearthed the hormones’ risks shows taking estrogen alone for menopausal symptoms, even for several years, may be safer than first thought.
The new finding—the latest from the Women’s Health Initiative, a federally funded trial that tracked thousands of women taking hormones or placebo pills for years—looked at women who have had hysterectomies and thus can take estrogen unaccompanied by another hormone, progestin. (Women with a uterus take progestin to protect against uterine cancer.) It found that a heightened risk of stroke from taking estrogen faded with time, while a reduced risk of breast cancer held steady.
That news, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., may weaken—for this group of women—the current recommendation from doctors that hormones to treat hot flashes and other menopausal symptoms should be taken in the smallest doses possible for the shortest amount of time.
Note to Congress: Planned Parenthood is Not a ‘Women’s Health’ Organization
As everyone waits with baited breath to see if there will be a federal government shutdown, few have closely examined one of the bigger sticking points in the budget debate: Funding for Planned Parenthood. In mid-February, the House voted to defund Planned Parenthood by a vote of 240 to 185. Meanwhile, in the upper chamber, forty-one senators have pledged to oppose any spending bill that threatens defund the organization.
The organization is deeply concerned about being losing federal funds. Startled by the intensity of the campaign on Capitol Hill to defund its work, Planned Parenthood is fighting back with a series of TV ads branding itself as a women’s health care organization. One ad features a middle-aged white woman who says she is alive today because Planned Parenthood diagnosed her cervical cancer. Contraception? Not even mentioned. Abortion? Nowhere in sight. Instead Planned Parenthoods describes itself as a leader in the fight against cancer and HIV.
Ads like these make an important point: Women have broader health care needs than abortion. But is women’s health care Planned Parenthood’s central identity? For decades Planned Parenthood and its political supporters have asked us to believe that the answer is “yes,” and that what’s good for Planned Parenthood (i.e. government funding) is good for women. Now appears to be an opportune moment to rise above culture war partisanship in order to take a serious look at this assertion. At the heart of opposition to continued government funding of Planned Parenthood are claims that the organization is extensively and aggressively involved with abortion. These claims are accurate. Planned Parenthood performs more than one out of every four abortions in the United States today. Its abortion revenues – based upon figures from its tax returns, annual reports and website – account for more than one third of all its medical services revenues. In the past decade, increases in government funding of Planned Parenthood have regularly corresponded with its performing increasing numbers of abortions.
Planned Parenthood’s stance on abortion is also fairly characterized as aggressive. A review of every reported lawsuit in which Planned Parenthood has been a party over the last 50 years indicates that they hold legal and cultural opinions on abortion very far removed from what Americans understand to be the “common ground” shared between most pro-life and pro-choice citizens. Planned Parenthood has sued to stop laws securing parents’ involvement in their minor girls’ abortions, laws requiring full informed consent and waiting periods before abortion, laws banning “intact dilation and extraction” (a.k.a. “partial-birth”) abortions, and safety regulations setting time-limits for the use of abortion-inducing drugs. They have also sued to limit the expansion of crisis pregnancy services offering free help to low-income, pregnant women who wish to give birth.
Planned Parenthood officials are even on record attacking the constitutionality of laws banning sex-selection abortion. They also seek to soften or avoid the impact of sex abuse reporting laws applicable to minor girls. In a 1986 lawsuit, Planned Parenthood opposed child abuse reporting law regarding minors under 14 on the grounds of minors’ “constitutional right to privacy,” alongside Planned Parenthood’s claimed duty to preserve patient confidentiality. Presently, Planned Parenthood is fighting a bill in Illinois which would require its staff and volunteers to be mandatory reporters when they suspect the sexual abuse of minors. Planned Parenthood claims that the bill is unnecessary because medical personnel are already obliged to report; they also wanted to spare the relevant government office from reporting “overload.” Interestingly, Planned Parenthood has removed this argument from its own website after various reports about it emerged. Only a “screenshot” of the correspondence preserved by pro-life groups remains searchable by the public.
Biggest Health Mistakes Women Make
Experts say the number one mistake women make is getting their health information from the wrong source and not doing their own homework when it comes to their bodies.
Dr. Holly Thacker, the Director of the Center for Specialized Women’s Health at the Cleveland Clinic stopped by Channel 3 to break down the misconceptions of women’s health.
U of A seeks women in the trades to study gender-specific health risks
Erin Meetoos is apprenticing to be a welder because she thinks it’s a fun, exciting, challenging and well-paid occupation, but she knows it will put her health at risk.
“I know I’m probably going to lose some of my hearing, and my sight, I suppose. And all the fumes I’m inhaling does worry me about how my breathing will be in a few years,” the 22-year-old NAIT student says, citing job-related hazards she’s been told about.
But she doesn’t know what other health issues await her as a female welder or what, if any, impact her job might have on the health of a baby, if she were to get pregnant again, or on her ability to become pregnant.
“It concerns me because I would like to have more children in the future,” says Meetoos, who has a two-year-old daughter.
“If I was pregnant, would I (weld) for maybe four months and then stop until the baby is born? Maybe I shouldn’t work at all if I’m pregnant.”
No one, not even Alberta Workplace Health and Safety, knows what to do with a pregnant welder, because the studies that are available deal only with male welders, and many of those date back to the 1960s, says David Hisey, chairman of the Canadian Standards Association’s safety committee.
A study from Finland in 2008 suggested babies of women and their male partners, if either were welders, were born small for the gestation period or premature, Hisey says. But the findings weren’t definitive because the study was based on the birth of only 13 babies.
That’s why the CSA has asked two University of Alberta professors in occupational medicine to do the research. Their project is called the WHAT-ME (Women’s Health in Alberta Trades-Metalworking and Electricians) study. Metal- working jobs include welders, pipefitters, steamfitters and boilermakers.
About 1,800 women work in these untraditional trades in Alberta, and lead researchers Nicola Cherry, who heads the occupational medicine program at the U of A, and Jeremy Beach want as many of them as possible to sign up for the study.
The study will follow the women for at least two years, keeping tabs on their health and looking for any effects possibly related to their work, including pregnancy problems, Cherry says.
Cherry was first approached to do the study seven or eight years ago, “but I was not enthusiastic at the time, because I’m always worried with these studies of women that it will backfire, and the easiest thing for an employer to do is say, ‘We won’t employ any women’.”
The women who have so far signed up for the study, ranging in age from 18 to 60, have expressed concern about what their trades jobs are doing to their health.
For example, welders of both sexes can develop respiratory problems and metal-fume fever (similar to the flu), and arc welders can have problems with their eyes and skin.
“It is a hazardous trade,” Cherry says.
With Alberta on the verge of another boom in the energy industry, and qualified trades workers already scarce, Hisey expects even more women to apprentice in these jobs in the next couple of years, making it more important than ever for them to know what health hazards come with the work.
When Hisey worked for Syncrude Canada in Fort McMurray, “we had an unwritten policy that we just took (pregnant welders) out of the workplace,” he says. “The downside is, if the person is an apprentice, they lose their trade hours, and unless the company provides alternative employment, they’re going to lay the individual off.
“Generally, the women decide to go back to work,” Hisey says.
Quebec has a policy that takes pregnant workers out of the workplace when they work in trades where there might be some harm to the unborn child, even though there may be no documented proof, Hisey says. But they are the only jurisdiction in Canada that does, he adds.
“In Scandinavian countries, if you are allowed 1.0 of some substances as a normal worker, you’re allowed 0.5 if you’re pregnant, whether it affects you or not,” Hisey says.
“In North America, we like to say, ‘How many babies died because of that?’ It’s a numbers game here.”
The U of A study won’t be the final word on the issue. It will provide another source of information that, when all are pulled together, will allow better decisions about what, if any, health hazards are related to the jobs women are doing in metalworking and electrical trades.
“I know there are lots of welders pregnant in Alberta, and they need to have the information currently available, and Dr. Cherry needs the data that their bodies will provide,” Hisey says.
“If there are problems with those pregnancies, if there are problems with child birth, if there are problems with the child after they’re born, that needs to be documented so we can prevent it from happening to others.”