In 2002, Wyeth (maker of Prempro and Premarin) was hit with the news that claimed a link between breast cancer and the drugs it made for Hormone Replacement Therapy.
According to a recent study, as noted by among others Bloomberg, the rate of women diagnosed with breast tumors fell in 2003 and did not change in 2004, according to a report issued by researchers from M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Millions of menopausal women gave up on the HRT drugs affter the 2002 study was issued.
``The missing cancers, the ones that don't seem to have occurred, are the kinds that are responsive to hormone therapy,'' said the lead author, Peter Ravdin, an investigator at the cancer center, in a telephone interview. ``The decline was not a one-year wonder, a short-lived anomaly.''
Stopping hormone-replacement therapy may have led to 14,000 fewer breast cancers in 2003 than a year earlier, according to Donald Berry, head of quantitative sciences at M.D. Anderson.
What is notable in the article is this: Incidences of breast cancer rose about 0.5 percent a year throughout the 1990s according to the researchers. The last two years? A decline of more than 8 percent.
