LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The government panel says that estrogen and progestin replacement therapy should be used sparingly, and only to ward off the most intense symptoms of menopause - and not to protect against chronic disease.

Doctors recommended before 2002 that women use supplemental hormone treatments to restore levels of estrogen and progestin, which naturally wane during and after menopause. The theory was that the hormone supplements would lower women's risk of cancer and heart disease. As women tend to experience heart attacks about a decade later than men, it was thought that women's hormones must provide some sort of protective effect.

In 2002, the Women's Health Initiative, the first long-term study of hormone replacement therapy, which involved 160,000 women followed for 15 years, found little difference in heart disease rates among hormone users and non-users. Quite contrarily, the new data showed slightly higher rates of heart disease and breast cancer among those who relied on hormone therapy.

Thousands of women abandoned hormone therapy after these findings. Since those findings were made public, breast cancer and heart disease rates among postmenopausal women have dipped, possibly due to the drop in use of hormone therapy.

Over the last 10 years, scientists have continued to study the long-term effects of supplemental hormone treatments, including the use of estrogen on women's health outcomes. Some data suggests that some postmenopausal women taking hormone therapy may reduce their risks of bone fractures, dementia and even heart disease.

Due to the piecemeal way in which study results, each focused on a specific outcome, such as osteoporosis or heart disease have been released. The panel reviewed all the latest gold-standard evidence and weighed the potential benefits of hormone therapy to its risks in context

Experts say that while the hormone treatments do provide relief of menopausal symptoms like hot flashes and night sweats, the panel found that the hormones' risks don't justify long-term use for the prevention of other diseases.

Among the findings in the study:

-- Women taking estrogen and progestin in combination, or estrogen alone had up to a 30 percent lower risk of having a bone fracture compared with women taking placebo.
 
-- Hormone therapy does nothing to reduce women's heart disease risk.

-- Women taking hormone therapy increased their risk of having a stroke, gall bladder disease or urinary incontinence by 35 percent to 79 percent.

-- Women taking hormone therapy had twice the risk of developing potentially dangerous blood clots as women taking placebo.

-- Women taking both estrogen and progestin were more likely to develop breast and colon cancer.

-- Taking estrogen and progestin did not protect against dementia.

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