Hormone pills may make lung cancer …

There's more troubling news about hormone therapy for menopause symptoms: Lung cancer seems more likely to prove fatal in women who are taking estrogen-progestin pills, a study suggests. Hormone users who developed lung cancer were more than twice as likely to die from the disease as women who weren't taking hormones. The new findings mean that smokers should stop taking hormones, and those who have not yet started hormones should give it careful thought. It's the latest finding from the Women's Health Initiative, a federal study that gave 16,608 women either Prempro or dummy pills. The study was stop in 2002 when researchers saw more breast cancers in those on Prempro, the estrogen-progestin pill made by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. They continue to follow what happens to women in the study.

The new analysis looked at non-small-cell lung cancer, by far the most common type. It found no big difference in the number of lung cancers that developed in hormone users after five years on the pills and more than two years of follow up.

However lung cancer proved fatal in 46 percent of hormone users who developed it versus 27 percent of those given dummy pills. Women who take hormones already are advised to use the lowest dose for the shortest time possible. Still, there have been only 106 lung cancer deaths in the study so far — too few to make sweeping conclusions about risk, and most women no longer use hormones the way they used to. In the federal study, women started on them at an average age of 63 and took them for more than five years. Now, the typical age of starting is 51 to 54, and average use is two years. The same risks may not apply with the new patterns of use. Researchers have not yet analyzed lung cancer risk in another part of the federal study that tested estrogen alone without progestin. Lung cancer is the world's top cancer killer.