A new report suggests cardiologists should reconsider prescribing hormonereplacement therapy to women with heart disease.

Researchers at Duke Clinical Research Institute in Durham, N.C., analyzed data from studies focused on the effects of hormone replacement therapy in women with and without heart disease.

Researchers reported Wednesday at the American College of Cardiology'sannual meeting in New Orleans that women with previous heart disease whotook hormones ran the risk of having a  second heart attack or developing unstable angina.

In one study, researchers found 37 percent of the women studied who startedtaking hormones after their first heart attack were hospitalized within a year for chest pains compared with 17 percent of women heart attack patients who never took hormones and 21 percent who had  used the hormones before their heart attack.

In another study, researchers found hormone therapy increased the risk of aheart attack in post-menopausal women with heart disease. Researchers whostudied 1,857 post-menopausal women found that 32.5 percent of the 111 women who took hormones after their first heart attack were hospitalized for angina.  

For several years, research has shown hormone replacement therapy couldcounter the effects of possibly developing heart disease in post-menopausal women.

"While hormone use has benefits and may still be cardioprotective in women without heart disease, women who have disease should probably not start using them," says lead researcher Dr. Karen Alexander.

Dearest note:  What's confusing about all this is that many women don't know if they have or are "developing" some form of heart disesase before they start using hormones -- and from other studies recently reported in JAMA, we've seen that HRT doesn't provide heart protection as once thought. Also, who's to know if the HRT taken during perimenopause and menopause might not *cause* heart disease. If I am still around doing this in the next few years, and I sure hope to be, it wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that HRT can cause heart problems in women -- this is just my opinion, not a statement of fact.