Estrogen-Fueled Breast Cancer Rates Fall 7 Percent

Hormone Replacement Therapy Decline Credited

The most significant drop in the rate breast cancer in the U.S. since 1998 appears to be due to a decline in use of hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Women who had been taking HRT to cope with menopause symptoms stopped using the drug after a study showed that HRT pills raise your risk of developing tumors. Estrogen fuels many cases of breast cancer. This news was given during the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, from research done by Dr. Peter Ravdin, at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. The American Cancer Society did their own study of the same data, and confirmed the drop in cases of breast cancer. "It's better than a cure" because these are cases that never occurred, said Dr. Rowan Chlebowski of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. Read full article.

• Decline in Breast Cancer Cases Likely Linked to Reduced Use of Hormone Replacement
• Hormone Study from Women's Health Institute
• San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium

Image courtesy of RCSB Protein Data Bank. PDB ID: 1A52, Tanenbaum, D.M., Wang, Y., Sigler, P.B., Crystallographic comparison of the estrogen and progesterone receptor's ligand binding domains. Proc.Natl.Acad.Sci.USA v95 pp.5998-6003, 1998