Research Projects

Ceasing HRT

Summary

Stopping HRT by women who have been on this therapy for some time often results in a recurrence of hot flushes or hot flushes occurring for the first time. There are benefits as well as risks associated with using HRT; these benefits may be lost when you decide to stop. Hot flushes affect the ability of women to carry out their normal duties both at work and at home and substantially affect their quality of life. Although many women are greatly concerned about the risk of breast cancer or other unfavourable effects with prolonged use of HRT, they find it necessary to return to use of HRT despite their worries as they cannot tolerate their symptoms. There is a belief that reducing the HRT dose slowly over some months may prevent the return of hot flushes. However, there is as yet no proven method on which medical practitioners can rely in order to decide how women should best stop their HRT regimen to prevent the development of hot flushes.

This study is aimed at finding the best way for women to stop their HRT without having a troublesome return of symptoms.

 

Who can participate

Healthy postmenopausal women who still have a womb, have been using combined oestrogen and progestogen HRT either as a tablet or patch for at least 12 months, would like to stop HRT and are prepared to change if necessary from the HRT you are currently taking to the equivalent dose of a standard treatment with either tablets or patches to be used by all women in the study.

What to expect

If you are eligible you will be asked to sign the consent form and then complete a short standard questionnaire used in many menopause studies about your general well-being and any menopausal symptoms you may have (menopause rating scale, MRS).

If you are using tablets for HRT but not taking Ogen as your oestrogen and Provera as your progestogen you will be changed to the standard study treatment at the equivalent dose of these tablets. The reason for this is that these tablets are easy to break in half and therefore better suited to reducing the dose of hormones as women come off HRT, which requires stepwise dose reduction.

If you are on patches but not using Estalis you will be changed to this patch. It is important for all participating women to be on the same treatment to allow for comparison of the different ways of stopping HRT to see if one is better than another.

Once you have been on the standard treatment for four weeks you will be randomly assigned to stopping immediately, over a month or a six-month period. Neither you nor the researcher will be able to choose into which group you are placed.

During your participation in the study you will be asked to keep a record of any menopausal symptom you may have. If you develop hot flushes during treatment the research team will adjust your treatment dose as necessary.

Two and six months after you stop HRT completely you will be asked to fill in the menopausal rating scale again.

Contact phone     02 8752 4350
Contact email     research@fpnsw.org.au