Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0476089 (endometrial cancer)
 11,379 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Biomedical researchers have added cardiovascular disease (CVD) to the list of symptoms resulting from lowered estrogen levels and menopause. Thus health providers promote hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to prevent CVD. Yet most women tend to be healthy during the postmenopausal years which constitute at least 33% of their lives. The medical community has taken a natural event, menopause, and labeled it as a disease which causes other diseases. Science is basically patriarchal. Physicians use it to justify their privilege to define illness and treatment. They reduce organic processes into a narrow cause-effect relationship and ignore socioeconomic and political factors. An often ignored problem with the scientific community's view of CVD is that almost all cardiovascular intervention studies included only men as subjects except the prospective Framingham Study. Traditional risk factors of CVD in women are hypertension, cholesterol levels, cigarette smoking, diabetes, excess weight, oral contraceptives, and genetics. Various studies show a reduction in the age adjusted risk of CVD morbidity any mortality in women on estrogen replacement theory (ERT). Specifically, estrogen affects serum lipids in a positive direction. Yet the women in the studies are healthy, lean, and exercise regularly. Some studies reveal an increased risk of breast cancer and endometrial cancer in women on ERT. HRT consists of a combination of estrogen and progestin, but data do not confirm that it is as protective against CVD as ERT. HRT is postmenopausal women is an untested hormonal experiment. In 1986, the US National Institutes of Health wrote a policy to include women as subjects in research studies. It did not happen so in 1991 it established the Office of Women's Health Research. The US Congress has also taken up the issue. Nurse researchers should critique methods used by patriarchal science to study menopause. Nurses can inform postmenopausal women about their choices concerning HRt to prevent CVD.
ANS Adv Nurs Sci 1992 Jun
PMID:Cardiovascular disease in women and noncontraceptive use of hormones: a feminist analysis. 160 87