A few years ago many specialists did not agree with hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Many of them considered it a medical mess. Until 2002 women used this therapy, a combination of estrogen and progesterone, which was helpful in easing menopausal symptoms. In 2002 a study named the Women's Health Initiative Health study proved the contrary. They sustained that hormone replacing therapy means a life threatening risk for developing heart attacks, strokes or cancer.

After this study medical practice has changed. According to statistics women quit hormone replacement therapy in about 65 % of the cases. Doctors also stopped prescribing it.

Experts believe that hormone replacement therapy will be coming back. The reasons are the benefic effects over menopause symptoms such as hot flashed. More than that, later studies proved the fact that hormone replacement therapy may have benefic effects for women who are early in menopause too.

Their opinion is that the Women's Health Initiative Health study is too negative and they try to find a balance between the two studies with so different results.

Jacques Rossouw, MD, project officer for the federal Women's Health Initiative, said that if two studies of the same phenomenon show such different results, we should choose safety. He also says that even if the new study shows some preventative benefit for younger women his opinion is that the benefits are very slight. He also sustains that no one can prove if the benefits would last if the women kept taking hormones as they get older.

More and more specialists agree that hormone therapy should be still used as a preventive treatment, for limited periods, because it might help preventing disease in younger women around the age of menopause.

Dr. says Shelley R. Salpeter, MD, a clinical professor of medicine at Stanford University's School of Medicine found after a study that hormone replacement therapy reduces the number of heart attacks and cardiac deaths by 32 % in women that are younger than 60 or women that had been through menopause less than 10 years. For the older women this type of therapy proved to increase the cardiac events in the first year and then began to reduce them after two years.

The mentioned percentage, 32 %, might not be a spectacular drop but it shows that hormone replacement therapy is not as dangerous as the Women's Health Initiative Health study believed. More than that, Salpeter believed that women around 60 will have a cardiac event in one year if they don't get hormone replacement therapy.