 Stanford’s Marcia L. Stefanick: Hormone Therapy on Trial
In the
hierarchy of breaking medical stories, there’s news, then there’s
page-one news, and then there are bombshells. The latest
paradigmatic example of the latter came in July of 2002, when the
Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) published the results of the
largest and longest clinical study of hormone replacement therapy
ever conducted. Covering more than 16,000 women subjects, this was
a randomized clinical trial that had been launched a decade
earlier to test the safety and efficacy of post-menopausal hormone
therapy. From the 1960s on, hormone therapy, or HT, accounted for
some of the nation’s most widely prescribed drugs. Time and time
again, epidemiologic studies had indicated that HT not only
improved the lifestyle of menopausal and post-menopausal women,
but also reduced the risk of heart disease (reportedly by as much
as 40 to 50%) and perhaps even Alzheimer’s
and osteoarthritis. The medical community’s
faith in the benefits of HT was so strong that when researchers
began planning the Women’s Health Initiative, a huge,
double-blind placebo controlled trial of the drugs in the late
1980s, they...
|
 |
 The
Hottest Research of 2002-03
 t’s
time once again for Science Watch’s yearly look back
at the hottest of recent research. Presented in the table
below are the authors who, as of late 2003, had published the
greatest number of Hot Papers over the preceding two years.
The table lists the (non-review) papers published in 2003 that
achieved the highest citation totals by the end of the year
(those cited 40 or more times as of late December)...
|
|
|
.
