This is my professional advice and rationale for hormone supplementation recommendation in reference to how it affects the diagnosis of breast disease and the interpretation of mammograms.

Importantly, I would like to provide you with my philosophy, if you will in the pursuit of breast cancer detection. That is, we must strive to find breast cancer in the earliest state possible. That not withstanding we must find conditions which “predispose” whether by environment, hormone replacement or hormone imbalance. I believe there is a hormone relation to breast cancer in the perimenopausal and menopausal state. I have had a lifetime interest in this particular area of radiology because I had a very young, personal family member who passed away at an early age from breast cancer. She had been diagnosed just after a pregnancy which is what initially sparked my interest. In regards to the media blitz about the recently halted women’s health initiative, I have pursued the matter of HRT quite zealously. In fact, I had been pursuing the estradiol/progestin (synthetically altered progesterone and estrogen) relationship to breast cancer occurrence for several years prior to this recent WHI report. The work I do as a radiologist specializing in breast disease and diagnosis is heavily weighted to patients who have taken these hormones and who have breast cancer.

George Sledge, M.D., Ballve-Lantero Professor of Oncology from the University of Indiana has documented cases that definitely support the theory that estradiol and estrone affect the oncogene for breast cancer. He also proved in the same study there was reversal of the estrogen affects via the tumor suppressive gene by progesterone. With these facts fairly established, I have proceeded to follow up on this highly suggestive pattern. I became involved with Aeron Laboratories through the work of Dr. Adeline Hackett, PH.D and Charlie Dalbaum, M.D., Ph.D founders of Aeron Labs as they have published multiple papers that support the increased accuracy of saliva testing and the relevancy to hormonal abnormalities.

I believe that the continuation of the WHI study using premarin alone will bear out the fact that due to the synthetic manipulation of estrogen/estradiol we are going to find that estradiol does potentiate the oncogene for breast cancer which is opposed by the tumor suppressive gene in progesterone. The tumor suppressive gene also works in colon cancer and other cancers.

In doing bone densities on my patients, I have found a certain element of people that have a paradoxical response to hormones; in fact, in most of these patients, they had a normal estradiol and low/ normal progesterone level but yet had a high response to bone density and subsequently had a high potential for developing breast cancer. From the radiologist point of view, patients on premarin or estradiol and provera have very dense glands on mammography. Conversely, those who have a low level of estradiol and normal progesterone show less dense glands on mammography. The correlation is very striking.

My goal is to maintain the highest standard of care possible. To this end, I offered hormone consult on the basis of providing breast cancer prevention and detection methods that yield the most positive outcome based on current HRT information.