The Menopause Brain

by Lisa Mosconi

Women’s Health Initiative (WHI). It was a federally financed examination of HRT started in the early nineties, extraordinary in both its scale and ambition: almost 160,000 postmenopausal women were enrolled in a multiyear comparison of estrogen pills with or without progesterone versus placebos. The goal was to provide conclusive evidence as to whether all this widescale prescribing of HRT was indeed a sound idea, with a particular focus on preventing heart disease. But on July 9, 2002, WHI investigators made the shocking announcement that they were pulling the plug on the trial three years earlier than planned. As it turned out, HRT was “too dangerous” to the participants’ health to proceed. The women on hormones had more heart trouble than their placebo-taking counterparts, instead of less. Their risk for stroke was on the rise, too, as was their risk for blood clots and breast cancer. Just as surprisingly, even their risk of dementia had gone up. Somehow HRT was doing precisely the opposite of what was intended and then some.