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Researchers found that 55.5 percent of women who were suffering moderate or severe hot flashes when they began taking hormone therapy experienced them again when they stopped, compared with 21 percent of those on a placebo.

For all women in the study, 21 percent had hot flashes after discontinuing, compared with 5 percent of those taking a placebo.

The journal authors, led by University of Massachusetts Medical School researcher Judith Ockene, said it was unclear how long women experienced renewed symptoms.

The Food and Drug Administration now recommends that hormone treatment be used for the shortest time possible, and at the lowest dosage.

But some experts said the study adds to the reasons to avoid hormone therapy entirely.

"The bottom line is that the more we study hormone therapy, the less attractive it seems and the more we realize how much money women have been wasting — and continue to waste — on this therapy," said Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Research Center for Women & Families.

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Hormone supplements once were prescribed for millions of women for menopausal symptom relief and other aging ills.

Use plummeted after the WHI released its results.

The long-standing belief has been that symptoms subside a few years after women have their last period and that taking hormones might help women avoid symptoms, although strong scientific evidence about the duration has been lacking, Dr.

Ockene said.

Researchers, she said, "would have assumed that 5?

years, which is the average length in this study, would have been enough time to see them not return." Mrs.

Smith of Fitchburg, Mass., said she started having menopausal symptoms at age 49, with hot flashes so severe that they steamed up car windows.

They disappeared during the study.

"Within a month [of stopping use of the pills, the symptoms] were back again.

Not quite so bad, but I still wake up at night with a good one," Mrs.

Smith, 73, said recently.

The original study involved 16,600 women ages 50 to 79 who were given Mrs.

Smith was among 8,405 WHI participants surveyed by mail eight to 10 months after the study was halted.

Dr.

Ockene said those results suggest that many women on fake pills might have gone through natural menopause dur...