How NIH Misread Hormone Study in 2002
According to WomenInBalance.org, this article, published on the five year anniversary of federal government health officials announcing that they had halted a major study of menopause hormones, saying the drugs increased a woman’s risk of heart attack by 29%, tells the story of the confusion and controversies that arose (and still remain) from the way a small group chose to “interpret” the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) data.
Jacques Rossouw, lead physician who has overseen the WHI since its inception, defends the government’s handling of the study results “based on what we knew at the time,” and says that study officials wanted to make a dramatic statement.
“Our main job at the time was to turn around the prevailing notion that hormones would be useful for long-term prevention of heart disease,” he says. “That was our objective. That was a worthy objective which we achieved.”
We join WomenInBalance.org in wondering whose “worthy” objective was served. We don’t think women were served, nor science, as the way in which the data was “interpreted” did not include other key findings that refute their interpretations, nor make a crucial distinction between the hormones that were studied and those that were not. In their “interpretation,” they chose to generalize the study to all hormones. We know now this is NOT THE TRUTH and that bioidentical estrogens and progesterone have some quite different effects from the non-bio-identical hormones used in the WHI study.
