Email a Friend
Print ArticleInformation and Resources
This article is from the WebMD News Archive
Estrogen After Menopause Improves Eye Health
June 13, 2001 -- Forget hot flashes -- the real reason to take hormone replacement therapy after menopause is because of the multitude of benefits on health. The latest research demonstrates that it may even save your vision.
As women reach menopause, their bodies' production of female hormones like estrogen slows to a crawl, and their risk for several diseases, including heart disease, increases. Taking estrogen after menopause has been shown not only to reduce its annoying symptoms, like hot flashes, but also to reduce the risk of more serious conditions, including heart disease.
Most recently, a study from the June 11 issue of the medical journal Archives of Internal Medicine shows that estrogen might be good for the eyes. Taking estrogen supplements after menopause appears to reduce the chance that the lens in the eye, which must remain clear for good vision, would start to become cloudy. This clouding of the lens is called cataracts. This condition can interfere so much with vision and is so common in older people that about 1.35 million surgeries to remove cataracts are performed in the U.S. each year.
Rita Hiller, MS, who's with the National Eye Institute in Bethesda, Md., and colleagues from around the country, collected data from two long-term studies, the Framingham Heart Study and the Framingham Eye Study, in which health information was collected over several years on thousands of people. Among the more than 500 menopausal women they looked at, those taking estrogen were less likely to develop the signs of cataracts. The longer they had been taking estrogen, the less the risk of developing clouding of the lens.
"The use of estrogen replacement over a longer period of time is inversely correlated with the development [or progression] of a specific type of cataract, [called a] nuclear cataract," expert Jerome P. Fisher, MD, FACS, tells WebMD. "In other words, the longer the estrogen replacement therapy, the less likely is the development of nuclear cataract in women in the study. ... The nuclear cataract is the most common type of cataract in the age group studied." Fisher is an ophthalmologist working at the Center for Excellence in Eye Care in Miami.
According to Larrian Gillespie, MD, the study also does more than show that replacing estrogen after menopause helps maintain eye health. Another study, from the May issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology, showed that women with cataracts were more likely than women without cataracts to have heart disease. Thus, this research indirectly demonstrates that estrogen can protect the heart as well as the eyes in menopausal women. Gillespie is a retired urologist and urogynecologist from Beverly Hills, Calif., and author of the book The Menopause Diet. She was not involved in the research.
del.icio.us
-
1
-
2
-
3
-
4
-
5
-
6
-
7
-
8
-
9
-
10
-
11
-
12
-
1
-
2
-
3
-
4
-
5
-
6
-
7
-
8
-
9
-
10
-
11
-
12
-
1
-
2
-
3
-
4
-
5
-
6
-
7
-
8
-
9
-
10
-
11
-
12
Boosting Your Breasts Without Implants
A breakthrough procedure gives women who want bigger breasts, but don’t like the idea of implant surgery, a new option.
