Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) may have been a bigger cause of breast cancer than even the gloomiest predictions suggested.
Breast cancer rates dropped by 13 per cent in urban areas and among more affluent women after HRT was blamed for causing breast cancer, but rates dropped by only 7 per cent in rural areas, and among poorer communities - and so researchers from the Northern Californian Cancer Center decided to find out what accounted for the difference.
They discovered that women in these communities had not heard the bad news about HRT, and so hadn’t stopped taking the drug, suggesting that it was to blame for many instances of breast cancer.
(Source: BMC Medicine, 2009; in press).