Jennifer Gunter

People were prescribing it to 75-year-olds for heart disease.

So this trial was designed to answer the question, should we be doing that?

And so it's very easy for us to go back and sort of say, well, they're the wrong women.

But that was what it was designed to do because that's what people were doing.

And, you know, it was designed for everybody to be after menopause because if you give people who are still menstruating hormones, you're going to make them bleed irregularly.

And now you've unblinded your study.

Right.

So you needed to get people who were at least a year postmenopause.

So you weren't going to, you know, be causing bleeding.

But also they ideally wanted people who didn't have hot flashes.

So they're a very small percentage of those, because if you're taking a drug and all of a sudden your hot flashes go away, you're like, well, maybe I was getting the medication.

Right.

So it was really designed to answer that question.

And people have gone back and then looked at like the 50 to 59 year old age group and tried to sort of to get the data out from there.

And even when you look at those groups, the benefits are not there to recommend it as preventative therapy.

Because you have to also remember when we're talking about the 13-year, 18-year follow-up, we're talking about five years or seven years of drug now with 13 years of observational data afterwards, right?

So might people change their behaviors because they were given a drug that at the time they thought was harmful?

So, you know, we have to, we just have to be careful about what we say we know for sure based on that.

Well, we do.

We have, so we have, ELITE was oral estradiol, I believe, and then we have KEEPS, which was a different dose of permarin, I think it was 0.45, and then it was transdermal, 15-microgram patch.