WASHINGTON — Women usually use hormone remedy to alleviate scorching flashes and different menopause signs — and new analysis suggests patches or lotions could also be safer for his or her blood strain than tablets.

As girls’s our bodies produce decrease ranges of reproductive hormones throughout menopause their danger for coronary heart illness rises. High blood strain additional will increase that danger - but it surely’s not clear whether or not there’s a hyperlink with hormone remedy for menopause signs.

Canadian researchers puzzled if the best way hormones are absorbed — orally, vaginally or by means of the pores and skin — may play a job.

The University of Calgary crew examined well being information of greater than 112,000 girls ages 45 and older who crammed prescriptions for not less than six months’ price of estrogen-only hormone remedy between 2008 and 2019. They tracked which girls went on to develop hypertension not less than a 12 months after beginning remedy.

While the variations weren’t enormous, girls who took estrogen tablets had a 14% larger danger of creating hypertension in comparison with these utilizing pores and skin patches or lotions, the researchers reported Monday. Oral estrogen carried a 19% higher danger than vaginal variations.

The findings have been printed within the journal Hypertension.

Hormone remedy has a mixture of dangers and advantages that imply it’s not for everybody. Today it’s prescribed to not forestall illness however to alleviate menopause-related signs — usually utilizing the bottom potential dose for the shortest time. Most generally used are mixture tablets of estrogen and one other hormone, progestin. (Estrogen-only tablets sometimes are prescribed to girls with no uterus.)

Different variations of hormone remedy may go higher for various menopause signs, one thing the research didn’t tackle.

But it provides essential clues to understanding the complicated relationship between hormone remedy and blood strain, stated Dr. Garima Sharma, a girls’s coronary heart specialist with Virginia’s Inova Health System and the American Heart Association.

Sharma wish to see a extra rigorous trial that compares totally different hormone variations. But she pointed to a potential organic rationalization: Maybe oral estrogen impacts enzymes linked to blood strain because it’s being processed, whereas pores and skin and vaginal variations have far more restricted exercise within the physique.

Still, “these findings are very clinically relevant,” Sharma stated in an an electronic mail, and counsel it’s particularly essential to watch blood strain in girls who use oral hormone remedy.

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