Hormone Replacement in Women with Breast Cancer: The HABITS Study

Abstract

Ever since Professor William T. Creasman suggested the use of hormone replacement therapy in breast cancer survivors in the early 1980s, interest in this field has been guarded but present. Prescribing HRT to breast cancer survivors was initially thought of as being outrageous. Yet even then with experience in HRT spanning a good three decades, and with the breast cancer epidemic, so confidently predicted, then as it is now never actually materializing, doctors working in the field had started to question the conventional wisdom. The debate on whether to treat breast cancer survivors with HRT has been revisited from time to time as there has been a powerful demand for a solution for such symptomatic women. The HABITS study was thus designed to investigate the use of HRT in breast cancer survivors.