Abstract
From
2002 to 2003, the breast cancer incidence in the United States, as
reported by the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance Epidemiology
and End Results (SEER 9) database, appeared to decrease by 6.7%. This
phenomenon has been attributed to a reduction in the use of menopausal
hormone therapies after the initial publication of the Women's Health
Initiative (WHI) study results in July of 2002.
However, attempts to
draw a causal association between the use of menopausal hormone
therapies and the incidence of breast cancer have not accounted for the
facts that prescriptions of estrogen-plus-progestin menopausal
therapies, which are associated with increased rates of breast cancer,
fell by 53% from 2002 to 2003, while prescriptions of estrogen-only
therapies fell by only 27%. To address this issue,...
