With the decline of ovarian function and the low level of sex hormones, perimenopausal (menopausal) women will more or less experience a variety of symptoms, such as menstrual disorders, hot flashes and night sweats, palpitations, insomnia, depression, agitation, urinary frequency and urgency, atrophic vaginitis, osteoporosis, etc. Collectively, these symptoms are known as perimenopausal (menopausal) syndrome, which has a serious impact on the physical and mental health and quality of life of women. How to relieve menopause syndrome? “Supplement what is lacking” – the most effective method is hormone supplementation (MHT). However, due to the general concern that hormone supplementation may cause tumors, people are afraid of talking about hormones. Can hormone supplementation really cause tumors? How big is the risk? This is the question that everyone is very concerned about. Today, I will introduce the relationship between hormone supplementation and tumor. 1.Endometrial Cancer In the history of the application of hormone therapy, there was a time when the increased risk of endometrial cancer was caused by the use of estrogen alone, which caused panic in the society. Later, it was found that for women with a uterus, the use of estrogen + progestin therapy can effectively protect the endometrium and reduce the risk of endometrial cancer instead of increasing it. The endometrial protection is even more effective if estrogen + progesterone is applied continuously and uninterruptedly. Obesity is a high risk factor for endometrial cancer, and estrogen and progestin are more effective in obese women. However, there is controversy about the safety of long-term use (>10 years) of estrogen-progestin therapy. Therefore, current evidence at least suggests that short-term (less than 10 years) application of estrogen and progestin does not increase the risk of endometrial cancer. 2. Ovarian Cancer Current findings suggest that both estrogen therapy and estrogen-progestin therapy increase the risk of ovarian cancer. The risk of ovarian cancer is about 1.1 to 1.3 times higher than those who do not use hormones. How is this value to be interpreted? Just looking at the value it does seem quite high, it seems to increase by 10-30%, but in fact, if you understand it in a different way, it is not so scary. For example, if women who start MHT around the age of 50 take it for 5 years, there will be an increase of about 1 case of ovarian cancer for every 1,000 women who take MHT, and an increase of about 1 case of death due to ovarian cancer for every 1,700 women who take MHT; and after 10 years of taking it, there will be an increase of about 1 case of ovarian cancer for every 600 women who take MHT and an increase of about 1 case of death due to ovarian cancer. From this point of view, although hormone therapy elevates the risk of ovarian cancer, but the absolute value does not significantly increase, there is no need to cause panic. Breast Cancer Current research shows that for women who have had their uterus removed, the use of estrogen alone reduces the risk of breast cancer and is safer than the combined use of estrogen and progestin. In addition, it has also been shown that estrogen alone has no effect on the risk of breast cancer in younger women within five years of menopause, but reduces the risk of breast cancer in women who have been menopausal for more than five years. Therefore, the available evidence suggests that hormone therapy does not increase the risk of breast cancer. 4.Cervical cancer Cervical cancer is different from other gynecological tumors in that the pathogenesis is mainly related to human papillomavirus (HPV virus) infection. Only individual pathologic types are related to hormones. Therefore, the risk of cervical cancer due to hormone therapy has been little studied. 5. Other tumors Established studies have shown that hormone therapy does not increase the risk of lung cancer. Hormone therapy can reduce the risk of colorectal cancer, esophageal cancer and gastric cancer. To sum up, hormone therapy does not increase the risk of endometrial cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, esophageal cancer and stomach cancer, but slightly increases the risk of ovarian cancer. Therefore, people do not need to be too panic about the tumor risk of hormone therapy. Hormone therapy is effective in relieving symptoms associated with menopause, and when the benefits of using hormones far outweigh the harms, we can still choose hormone supplementation to improve the quality of life during menopause.