by Virginia Hopkins on 18/11/09 at 4:19 pm
Let’s have some straight talk and commonsense around the mammography controversy that has erupted this week. Thebottom line is, this controversy has nothing to do with concern over women’s health, and everything to do with money and politics.
 
On Monday (Nov 16), the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (PSTF), part of the government’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, released a report that recommends against routine mammography screenings for women ages 40 to 49. They recommend that women ages 50 to 74 have a mammogram every two years.
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Women who take the most common form of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) experience a hearing loss of 10 to 30 percent more than those who do not.
A study of 124 women showed that age-related hearing loss is accelerated for those whose HRT includes progestin, a synthetic form of progesterone.
Women who took progestin had the hearing loss usual for women up to a decade older.
The study compared the hearing of three groups of women aged 60 to 86. 30 had taken a form of HRT that included only estrogen; 32 had taken both estrogen and progestin; and 62 had never been on HRT. Each of the women was given a variety of hearing tests.
In all the tests, women whose HRT included progestin (the most common form) had worse hearing.
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Older generation birth-control pills may have significantly increased breast cancer risk among women with a family history of the disease.
In a study of 426 families, investigators found that oral contraceptive use tripled breast cancer risk among women with sisters or mothers who had the disease.
The risk was confined to women who used "the pill" prior to 1975.
Since then, birth control pills have evolved to include lower doses of estrogen and progestin, which may make them safer in terms of breast cancer, researchers suggest, although this will likely not be definitively known for years to come.
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