Menopause

5.5. What happens when you stop taking hormones

Hormone therapy only helps relieve symptoms of the menopause while the hormones are being taken regularly. So an important question for women is what happens if a woman stops taking the hormones, after six months or a year, for example? Unfortunately there is no clear answer. There are two possibilities. One possibility is that the phase with symptoms is already over, so that stopping causes no problems. The other possibility is that the symptoms will return once the hormones are stopped.

The best evidence at the moment comes from a trial with about 16,000 women in the USA [50]. The women in this study were taking hormones for six years on average. After they stopped, they were asked how it was going for them. The answer was that the symptoms came back for more than half the women. That raised the possibility that by taking HT, women might have delayed the time when they would need to cope with hot flashes and sweats but not avoided it completely.

Susanne

"They never went away completely. But they were not as bad. They came much less often… I had the feeling: now I can cope with this. "

It is possible to have lower doses of HT so that the woman still has the symptoms, but they are not a major burden. That gives women the chance to notice themselves when the symptoms are going away.

An important question too is what happens about the health risks: Does the higher risk of breast cancer with combined therapy stay if women stop taking the drugs or does the woman's risk go back to the usual risk? Unfortunately there is no reliable answer to this question. Some early study results suggest that it might be possible that the risk reduces over time.

Article Navigation

• back
• Page 23 of 25
• next

© IQWiG (Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care)