Hormone Replacement Therapy Doubles the Risk of Skin Cancer

The Hormone Replacement Therapy or HRT for menopausal women increases the chances of developing skin cancer by almost two times, a new Dutch research shows. Ideal for ladies dealing with surgical menopause, but also used by those who reach this stage in life naturally, this controversial treatment receives yet another blow with the latest study that comes to ring the alarm on the kind of risks both categories are exposed to.

The research, conducted at the Leiden University in the Netherlands and published in the Annals of Oncology, included almost 800 Dutch women diagnosed with a melanoma in the interval 1991-2004. These were later compared with a group of 4,000 cancer-free women, and the findings clearly indicated that HRT boosted the chances of developing a malignant melanoma if they stayed on the treatment for more than six months.

Those taking the pill are exposed to the same risks, the study also shows. Taking it for more than half a year increases the chances of a cancerous mole by almost 24 percent, researchers say. Both HRT and the pill are believed to have this effect because of the way estrogen in them “stimulates the growth of skin cells, called melanocytes,” the Daily Mail writes, citing from the recently-published study.

This is not the first time that the health implications of HRT are brought up for discussion. Women’s attitude towards it changed completely in 2002 when, for the first time, research showed that it increased chances of breast cancer, heart attacks and strokes. After the findings were made public by the Women’s Health Initiative of the National Institutes of Health in the US, the number of those using HRT dropped by more than a half.

Later on, the Million Women Study performed in the UK confirmed the findings of the previous one. Since then, thanks to an advisory published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, doctors recommend that women with normal menopause take the lowest doses of HRT possible for only the shortest time.