ABSTRACT
The future of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), more appropriately described as postmenopausal hormone therapy (PHT), has become an extremely topical issue with the recent publication of the first report from the Women’s Health Initiative randomized controlled trial of estrogen plus progestin in ‘healthy’ postmenopausal women1. The field had been thrown into substantial controversy by the earlier publication of another prospective randomized controlled trial, the Heart and Estrogen/progestin Replacement Study (HERS)2, in which the benefit of PHT for the secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease in women was shown to be lacking.
