Hormone supplements frequently prescribed to post-menopausal women may not protect them against heart disease after all, according to a study in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

"Women with heart disease should not use oestrogen replacement therapy as a treatment for heart disease," said Dr. David Herrington of Wake Forest University School of Medicine, who led the study of more than 300 women.

But the finding may not decrease the popularity of oestrogen and progestin supplements among women who have gone through menopause because the hormones have been shown to prevent crippling osteoporosis.

Cardiovascular disease, which includes heart disease and stroke, is responsible for 43 percent of deaths among women in the United States.

Earlier population-based research had suggested that women who took the hormones faced a lower risk of heart disease. But a newer study, the 1998 Heart and Estrogen/Progestin Replacement Study (HERS) found that hormone replacement therapy did not stop arteries from clogging.

The latest study seems to confirm the HERS result.

The Herrington team used coronary angiography to assess the amount of blockage in the heart arteries of the 309 volunteers at the beginning of the study, and then after they had been taking hormones or a placebo for an average of 3.2 years.

Although the hormone treatments did not affect the rate of artery blockage, they did dramatically lower cholesterol levels.

In an editorial in the Journal, Dr. Elizabeth G. Nabel warned that angiography, an X-ray study of the inside of the heart and blood vessels, does not always predict the risk of a heart attack or stroke.

In tests of cholesterol-lowering drugs, she said, angiography often showed little change in the arteries of peoples' hearts, even though heart attacks and strokes in the sample population declined by 30 percent to 90 percent.

Meanwhile, in a second study in the Journal, researchers at the Harvard University of Public Health found that lifestyle changes from the early 1980s to the early 1990s reduced the heart disease rate among women by 31 percent.

The reduction would have been even greater if the number of obese women had not increased, said the group, led by Dr. Frank B. Hu of the Harvard University School of Public Health.

Using data from 85,941 participants in the Nurses' Health Study, they found that from 1980 to 1994, smoking in women declined by 41 percent, hormone therapy increased by 175 percent and diets became healthier. However, the number of overweight women grew by 38 percent.

The findings, they said, "underscore the importance of diet and lifestyle in the primary prevention of coronary disease."

(From chinadaily.com.cn)