This week’s Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported a huge study from Denmark. Following over 900,000 women for 8 years, they found that post-menopausal women who had hormone therapy were 38% more likely to get ovarian cancer than peers who had not, and the higher risk persisted for 2 years after halting therapy. Moreover, “Regardless of the duration of use, the formulation, estrogen dose, regimen, progestin type, and route of administration, hormone therapy was associated with an increased risk of ovarian cancer.”

No doubt about it, 909,946 women is a huge study, 8 years is a long time to follow them, and a 38% rise in ovarian cancer is statistically significant. Moreover, since most ovarian cancer is not detected until it is far advanced, this is a scary statistic. It’s hard to find early stage ovarian cancer because the symptoms are vague. The 5 year survival rate is only 40%.

However, “Hormone therapy accounted for 5 percent of the cases of ovarian cancer in the study period….” In fact, “The absolute risk for any one woman is still quite small, however. The researchers calculated that for every 8,300 women, hormone therapy would result in one extra case of ovarian cancer a year.”

While this is worth thinking about, it is important to put things in perspective by looking at the other risk factors for this scary, hard to find, and thankfully rare cancer. The usual suspects like family history and age are there. White women are more likely to have ovarian cancer by 50%, far greater than the risk from hormone therapy. White women of Jewish descent have yet higher risk, and white Jewish women with a BRCA genetic mutation even higher! “[W]omen born with one of these mutations have a lifetime risk of ovarian cancer of 27-44%.” Compare that to the 140 extra cases among over 909,000 women in the Danish study. And just earlier this year, another fairly large study (nearly 100,000 women) found that obesity raised the risk of ovarian cancer by almost 80%.

The bottom line is that if you really are concerned about ovarian cancer, get your weight down to normal levels.

So, when being white, being Jewish, and being fat raised the risk so much more than hormone therapy, why is JAMA and the media flogging this latest research? Could it be part of their continuing crusade against all hormone therapies?