Updates

The length of estrogen exposure throughout a woman’s lifetime and the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) have been previously investigated with conflicting results [1]. The premise is that decreased lifetime duration of estrogen exposure increases the incidence of CHD (atherosclerosis). The Framingham study has lent credence to this hypothesis since women with premature or… Read More

A recently published paper by Waetjen and colleagues [1] reports on data derived from the SWAN study of community-dwelling, multi-ethnic, mid-life, American women passing through the menopausal transition. A cohort of 1529 women, free of incontinence at baseline, was followed through six annual follow-up visits with a self-administered questionnaire. During that time, 855 women reported… Read More

The objective of a recently published analysis of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) data on coronary heart disease (CHD) was to estimate the effect of therapy with continuous conjugated equine estrogens (CEE) + medroxyprogesterone acetate (MPA) on risk for coronary heart disease (CHD) over time and stratified by years since menopause [1]. The investigators intended… Read More

A recent population-based, case-control study conducted from 2003 to 2006 has reported a reduced risk of breast cancer among women using bisphosphonates [1]: 2936 incident cases of invasive breast cancer identified in the Wisconsin cancer registry and 2975 controls identified from drivers’ license lists were interviewed. Multivariate methods were used to control for confounding by… Read More

A new study on teriparatide (a PTH analogue) and alendronate brings again to clinical attention the issue of combination therapies for osteoporosis. The study by Finkelstein and colleagues [1] randomized 93 postmenopausal women with low bone mineral density (BMD) to either teriparatide 40 μg subcutaneously daily, or alendronate 10 mg daily, or both for 30… Read More

A recently published paper by DeLellis Henderson and colleagues [1] evaluated the risk of colon cancer associated with the duration and recency of specific menopausal hormone therapy formulations: unopposed estrogen versus estrogen combined with progestin among 56,864 peri- and postmenopausal women who were participating in the California Teachers Study, a prospective study during 1995–2006 (mean… Read More

Anna Nordstrom and colleagues recently investigated prospectively the relationship between bone mineral density (BMD), stroke and death [1]. Previous studies have demonstrated a relationship between osteoporosis and different manifestations of atherosclerosis such as endothelial dysfunction, coronary or carotid atherosclerosis. The aim of the current study was to evaluate BMD and osteoporosis as a prognostic risk… Read More

Bone mineral density (BMD) measurement using dual-energy X-ray densitometry (DXA) has long been established as the gold standard in the screening of osteoporosis. BMD measurement provides two indices: the [i]Z[/i]-score and the [i]T[/i]-score. The [i]Z[/i]-score is the number of standard deviations that the individual measurement differs from the mean value of the healthy population, matched… Read More

Menopause is a global physiological milestone in any woman’s life. Multitudes of studies have already described every aspect of this unique phenomenon, yet more are published in an attempt to further highlight ethnic, cultural, social and geographic differences in the symptomatology of menopause. Recently, a cross-sectional study of 1000 postmenopausal women from China, Malaysia, Taiwan,… Read More

Busy clinicians may be well-tempted to scan their monthly stack of journals and narrow down the reading list to a manageable few articles that may have some immediate gratification and perhaps find a study concerning a problem they had encountered just this week. Journal articles with esoteric words in the title can be a big… Read More