Updates

A recent population-based, case-control study conducted from 2003 to 2006 has reported a reduced risk of breast cancer among women using bisphosphonates [1]: 2936 incident cases of invasive breast cancer identified in the Wisconsin cancer registry and 2975 controls identified from drivers’ license lists were interviewed. Multivariate methods were used to control for confounding by… Read More

A new study on teriparatide (a PTH analogue) and alendronate brings again to clinical attention the issue of combination therapies for osteoporosis. The study by Finkelstein and colleagues [1] randomized 93 postmenopausal women with low bone mineral density (BMD) to either teriparatide 40 μg subcutaneously daily, or alendronate 10 mg daily, or both for 30… Read More

A recently published paper by DeLellis Henderson and colleagues [1] evaluated the risk of colon cancer associated with the duration and recency of specific menopausal hormone therapy formulations: unopposed estrogen versus estrogen combined with progestin among 56,864 peri- and postmenopausal women who were participating in the California Teachers Study, a prospective study during 1995–2006 (mean… Read More

Anna Nordstrom and colleagues recently investigated prospectively the relationship between bone mineral density (BMD), stroke and death [1]. Previous studies have demonstrated a relationship between osteoporosis and different manifestations of atherosclerosis such as endothelial dysfunction, coronary or carotid atherosclerosis. The aim of the current study was to evaluate BMD and osteoporosis as a prognostic risk… Read More

Bone mineral density (BMD) measurement using dual-energy X-ray densitometry (DXA) has long been established as the gold standard in the screening of osteoporosis. BMD measurement provides two indices: the [i]Z[/i]-score and the [i]T[/i]-score. The [i]Z[/i]-score is the number of standard deviations that the individual measurement differs from the mean value of the healthy population, matched… Read More

Menopause is a global physiological milestone in any woman’s life. Multitudes of studies have already described every aspect of this unique phenomenon, yet more are published in an attempt to further highlight ethnic, cultural, social and geographic differences in the symptomatology of menopause. Recently, a cross-sectional study of 1000 postmenopausal women from China, Malaysia, Taiwan,… Read More

Busy clinicians may be well-tempted to scan their monthly stack of journals and narrow down the reading list to a manageable few articles that may have some immediate gratification and perhaps find a study concerning a problem they had encountered just this week. Journal articles with esoteric words in the title can be a big… Read More

There remains enormous controversy concerning the treatment of depression in women, particularly the depression that is premenstrual and postnatal and in the menopausal transition which, in the view of many, should be treated with transdermal estrogens. The role of estrogens is, however, less clear in the postmenopausal woman.     We know that depression is… Read More

The rationale for using vitamin D in older people to prevent fractures exists beyond doubt but both the dose of vitamin D and the need for co-supplementation with calcium are not exactly clear. Conflicting results have been reported from various randomized trials examining the effect of vitamin D supplementation (with or without calcium) on the… Read More

Two new studies have addressed once again the issue of worsening of the cardiovascular risk profile in midlife, while focusing on the menopause transition and the role of menopause itself vis-à-vis aging as determinants of this physiological process. The first study investigated the SWAN cohort (Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation), a longitudinal, multi-site,… Read More