Replacing Replacement Therapy

By GINA KOLATA

T'S official: no longer will the hormones many women take at menopause be called "hormone replacement therapy." As the National Institutes of Health announced last week, treatment with estrogens and progestins is now to be called "menopausal hormone therapy."

The hormone treatment never was a replacement and never did restore the physiology of youth, and the treatment name should reflect that, federal scientists and Food and Drug Administration officials said.

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"We have to separate our aging from our going through menopause," said Dr. Susan Hendrix, a gynecologist at Wayne State and an investigator in a large federal study that cast doubt on the drugs' overall benefit. "We can't take a pill for the rest of our lives to make us young."

Such drugs relieve symptoms of menopause, like hot flashes, and can also help maintain bone mass. But they also confer slight risks of heart attacks, strokes, blood clots and breast cancer. They don't make women look younger, and it's not known whether they can stave off memory loss.

With the old name, "it was almost as though language was corrupting thought," said Dr. Barnett Kramer, director of the office of disease prevention at the National Institutes of Health.

"If you think that all you're doing is treating a deficiency, you can fool yourself into thinking you don't even need to test the hypothesis that the benefits of giving hormones would outweigh the harm," Dr. Kramer said.

  Gina Kolata