Getting your player ready...
WASHINGTON — Add another risk to hormone therapy after menopause: benign breast lumps.
One type of hormone therapy — estrogen and progestin — already is well-known to increase the risk of breast cancer. But a major study of women able to use estrogen alone didn’t find that link.
Tuesday, researchers reported a new wrinkle: Those estrogen-only users doubled their chances of getting noncancerous breast lumps.
That’s a concern not only because of the extra biopsies and worry those lumps cause, but because a particular type — called benign proliferative breast disease — is suspected of being a first step toward developing cancer 10 years or so later.
