Prempro

“I think the study itself is reassuring,” said James H.

Pickar, Wyeth’s assistant vice president of clinical research and development.

He said that menopause hormones “should not be used for the prevention of cardiovascular disease, but they continue to be valuable treatments for the relief of menopausal symptoms.” What is so surprising about the latest hormone news is where it comes from.

While hormone advocates have long criticized the findings of the WHI, the new Journal of Women’s Health report doesn’t come from the anti-WHI camp.

It’s co-written by Harvard Medical School researcher JoAnn Manson, who was also the lead author on the WHI report linking hormones with higher heart-attack risk.

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"They hope to try a few of these, which they call representative cases or bellwether cases," Weisbrod said.

"And that based on these cases the parties would be encouraged to settle." Settlements won't be mandatory, he said.

Rather, the cases would be handled in the states where they originated.

Another large group of cases - roughly 1,500 versus Little Rock's 3,500 - is being handled in Pennsylvania state court, Weisbrod said.

This week, U.S.

District Judge William R.

Wilson Jr.

set dates for the Little Rock trials.

The trial in the case of Arkansas resident Linda Reeves is set for July 31.

If that case doesn't go forward, Rush's trial will take place that day.

Otherwise, the Rush trial will start Oct.

10.

Drug manufacturer Pfizer is also a defendant in the case as the maker of the progestin product Provera, which doctors combined with Premarin, a Wyeth estrogen product, for hormone replacement therapy.

Later, Wyeth introduced The plaintiffs argue that the drugs are dangerous, basing their argument in part on the results of a 2002 study by the National Institutes of Health's Women's Health Initiative.

The study concluded that long-term u...

Both plaintiffs charge that that combination estrogen/progesterone replacement drugs caused their breast cancer.

"Our position is clear," said Les Weisbrod, a law partner with Morgan & Weisbrod, which is representing one of the plaintiffs.

"For a long time, the makers twisted the science and suppressed the evidence of the true extent of the risk of these drugs while vastly overplaying the benefits," he said.

Rush says she began taking the drugs in 1989 and was diagnosed with breast cancer a year later.

The risks of HRT first came to light in 2002 when the National Institutes of Health released the results of a massive study of 16,608 women that showed a 26-percent increased risk of breast cancer, a 22-percent greater risk of heart disease, a 29-percent higher risk of heart attack and a 41-percent increased risk of stroke in patients on HRT, compared to a control group.

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