Seems Like Good News

[Guest StrandedOutThere]

Hi all. I was browsing around on Google Scholar and found this article:

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/1....1997.2601068.x

If you are on a college campus, you might be able to get access to the whole article. Everyone else, the link will take you to the abstract...which is just a summary of the big stuff. Basically, this was a large scale study of MTF's and FTM's who had been treated with hormones. People in the study varied greatly in how long they had been on hormones (from 2 months to 41 years). Anyway, when compared with age-matched peers, those treated with hormones didn't have a higher mortality rate than the general population! Since this was a pretty big study (816 MTF's and 294 FTM's), the results made me pretty happy. I'd heard that for FTM's who don't get SRS, T increases the risk of cervical/ovarian cancer and breast cancer. Also, for MTF's, I'd heard that hormones increased the changes of getting a blood clot. In this study, MTF's particularly those over age 40, showed a greater risk of getting blood clots than the general population. However, this risk seems to decrease when the over 40 MTF crowd uses transdermal hormone treatment.

I guess one big caveat here is that the number of FTM's included in the study was much smaller. It's harder to generalize results when the sample size is smaller. Still, it's good to know that researchers care enough about these issues to publish papers on the subject!