U.S. judge cancer risk of hormone therapy

The U.S. Supreme Court has accepted the claims of 123 women against Pfizer alleging that they used hormone therapy to relieve symptoms of menopause was supposedly the cause of breast cancer sufferers.

The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by Pfizer and has given the green light for women with breast cancer and the families of those who died sue the company and other manufacturers of these drugs to the Minnesota state court and the cancer and the hormone theraphy.

The plaintiffs and their families allege that the victims developed breast cancer as a result of hormonal replacement therapy is widely prescribed in the nineties to combat the symptoms of menopause.

Cancer and the hormone therapy

A federal judge had dismissed the claims of 116 of the 123 plaintiffs, alleging that it improperly joined claims. However, the federal appeals court reversed this decision, arguing that the drug maker has not shown that plaintiffs were improperly joined and the cancer and the hormone theraphy..
The high court rejected without comment the appeal of Pfizer on behalf of U.S. drugmaker Wyeth, manufacturer of the drug and pharmaceutical merged with last year.
In 2002, the prestigious firm of Women's Health Initiative (WHI) showed that hormonal treatment with estrogen and progestin was associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and some cancers.

Cancer Hormone Cure

In this essay on the effects of hormone replacement therapy involving 16,000 postmenopausal women who had to discontinue treatment when detected an increased risk of invasive breast cancer among those taking a cocktail of hormones.
In fact, U.S. health officials attribute the drop in breast cancer cases that the U.S. has in recent years to the discontinuation of hormone replacement therapy.

Cancer is the most costly disease

Cancer is a disease that costs the most modern societies in economic terms. A report from the American Cancer Society has been released to coincide with a conference on the disease to be held in China reveals a burden will increase further in the future.
In terms of labor productivity, the tumors and cancer have a greater burden of accounting for AIDS, malaria, influenza and other infectious diseases combined. In 2008, the burden of this disease was around 900,000 dollars (700,000 million euros), equivalent to 1.5% of global GDP. And that taking into account only their impact on productivity and years of life lost, not including what they cost treatments (increasingly expensive).
Indeed, as highlighted in this week's newspaper "The Washington Post, leading oncologists call an international movement similar to that already experienced the financing of HIV in the nineties to cope with the weight of tumors in the economy world.

The Cancer Cost

"It is not about taking money from infectious diseases," says Otis Brawley, director of the Society (one of the largest oncology agents nonprofit world), but cancer cost devote the attention it deserves.
According to his data, chronic diseases (cancer, diabetes, heart disease ...) cause 60% of global mortality, but receive only 3% of the global public and private funding.

The problem, recalled the report of the ACS (conducted in collaboration with the foundation's Livestrong Lance Armstrong), is that this disease affects individuals earlier in life than others, such as cardiovascular disease, which is a blow in the prime of its life.