Hormone Replacement Therapy: Benefits and Risks

Dear Colleagues,

The global trend of increased life expectancy and the consequent increase in the number of women entering menopause has turned postmenopausal women’s health into a major public health issue. An increasing number of women will reach their 100th birthday, thus living half of their life post-menopause. Most aging-related diseases in women occur on average 10 years after the onset of menopause, and thus menopause represents an important opportunity to promote better health over the second half of women’s lives.

Clinical practice regarding the use of hormone treatment during menopause has undergone dramatic changes in the last decades. In the last century, hormones were widely and indiscriminately recommended for the treatment of menopausal women. In the early 2000s, the misinterpretation of influential studies abruptly changed the hormonal management of menopause, leaving many symptomatic women to “suffer in silence”, with no help to cope with the menopausal symptoms worsening the quality of their life. More recently, those studies have been criticized, reanalyzed and reinterpreted, and new molecules and formulations have been developed to favor a more personalized approach that better fulfils women’s individual needs. A re-evaluation of the whole balance of risks and benefits of menopause hormone treatment (MHT) suggests that benefits of the available treatments exceed the risks in healthy symptomatic postmenopausal women when MHT is initiated within 10 years of menopause or at the age of < 60 years.

With these aspects in mind and given their importance for women’s health, the journal Medicina is launching a Special Issue entitled “Menopause Hormone Treatment: Benefits and Risks”. It is our pleasure to invite you and your co-workers to submit review articles aimed at providing a comprehensive overview of the current understanding of the different aspects and risk/benefit ratio of MHT. The overall aim of this issue is to inform clinical practice and introduce the readers to the new era of MHT.

Dr. Maria Cristina Meriggiola
Guest Editor

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