Asthma, but not COPD, associated with use of hormone therapy
Use of hormone replacement therapy by postmenopausal women is associated with an increased incidence of newly diagnosed asthma but not chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, say US researchers. Previous studies have suggested that changes in reproductive hormones may influence the development of asthma and asthma severity.
To investigate this, Graham Barr, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital,
Boston, and colleagues looked at data from the US Nurses’ Health
Study, which enrolled 121,700 female nurses aged 30 to 55 years in 1976.
The nurses were contacted once every two years and asked questions about
their medical history, diet, lifestyle and hormone use. From 1988 to
1996 the nurses were asked about new asthma and COPD diagnoses.
The researchers found that current users of oestrogen therapy were more
than twice as likely to be diagnosed with asthma than women who had never
used HRT (rate ratio 2.29, 95 per cent confidence interval 1.59-3.29).
Users of combination HRT had a similarly increased rate. In contrast,
the rates observed for new diagnoses of COPD, were the same for current
HRT users and non-users (1.05, 0.80–1.37).
The researchers conclude: “Female reproductive hormones may contribute
to the onset of asthma among adult women, but hormones do not appear
to hasten the development of COPD.” Archives of Internal Medicine
(2004;164:379).
HRT use and hearing Women who use HRT perform worse in some hearing
tests than women who do not use HRT, new data indicate. Researchers
compared the results of hearing tests for 64 women aged between 60
and 86 years. Women in the HRT group performed most poorly in a test
designed to measure how well they could decipher a sentence amid
background noise. The data, presented as a poster at an otolaryngology
meeting in Daytona, Florida, did not indicate whether there were
significant differences, for example in terms of age, between the
two groups of women tested.
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