Managing Menopause: Are the WHI Results Being Misunderstood?

Medscape


Hello. This is Dr JoAnn Manson, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. I would like to talk with you about a prospective piece that I and my colleague, Dr Andrew Kaunitz, have recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, titled "Menopause Management: Getting Clinical Care Back on Track."^[1] We wrote this article to address ongoing confusion about the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) and what it did and did not address. There has been continued misunderstanding about some of the WHI findings.
The WHI was designed to address a very specific question: What is the balance of benefits and risks when menopausal hormone therapy is initiated for the express purpose of trying to prevent chronic disease in postmenopausal women across a broad range of ages, including many women in their 60s and 70s? At the time when the WHI was initiated, it was becoming an increasingly common practice to start hormone therapy in women more than a decade past menopause for the purpose of trying to prevent heart disease, cognitive decline, and many other chronic diseases.....