A government panel has found that hormone therapy is not recommended for menopausal women.

U.S. Preventive Services Task Force are definitively decisive in their findings that the risks of hormone replacement therapy outweigh the benefits to menopausal women over 50.

The new recommendations are based on a review of data, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, covering nine clinical trials over the last decade.
The standard of care shifted for many doctors after the Women’s Health Initiative trial was halted, but updated recommendations from the task force are important because many patients still have questions, and many doctors are reluctant to let go of old prescribing habits, Crandall said.

Hormone replacement therapy was given routinely to women to mitigate symptoms that might develop and to prevent the development of cardiovascular diseases.

You can harness the power of Yoga to ease the symptoms of menopause.

Menopause brings with it fluctuating hormones that mess with your sleep, pack on pounds of belly fat, and make you irritable and less interested in sex.

But yoga can help.

Yoga practice cut hot flashes by 31% in one study, and other research has found that regularly doing yoga improved libido, mood, and craving control.

For middle-aged women searching for a safe alternative to hormone therapy to prevent bone loss and ease the symptoms of menopause, they are in for another letdown.

The latest in a series of disappointing studies finds that soy supplements, an increasingly popular substitute for hormone therapy, do not stave off hot flashes, night sweats, and other uncomfortable menopausal symptoms.

Nor did the supplements reduce the aging-related bone loss that can lead to osteoporosis, the study found.

“Isoflavones, the plant-derived estrogens found in soy, are very weak estrogens, so it is not surprising that they have not shown to be as effective…as hormone therapy,” says the lead author of the study, Silvina Levis, MD, the director of the osteoporosis center at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine.

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