When Gail Lamar was 53, she started having symptoms of menopause.

"I was lucky. I simply had the night sweats. I didn't have anything else. I didn't have the mood swings and I didn't have the sleep deprivation," Lamar says.

Her symptoms were mild, but she still wrestled with the decision about hormones. Would taking hormones keep her body healthy?

"Basically nothing I read gave a clear answer. There were pros and cons, and I was trying to figure out what was the right thing to do. When I heard about the study, I thought, 'finally, someone is trying to do something to help the next generation so they'll figure out what to do, or make it an easier decision,'" Lamar says.

She joined a clinical trial, the Women's Health Initiative, following more than 160,000 healthy postmenopausal women.

One arm of the study compared Prempro, a combination of estrogen and progestin, to a placebo. The study was meant to run for eight-and-a-half years, but was cut short this past July after five years.

Lamar, along with 16,000 other women in the study, were sent this letter and told to stop taking their medicine -- safety was the issue. The study found that compared to women taking a placebo, those on Prempro were at greater risk for invasive breast cancer, heart attack, stroke and blood clots.

Simply put, the risks of Prempro outweighed the potential benefits -- fewer hip fractures and fewer colon cancers.

For years, recommendations were based on what we thought was right. This study says we got it wrong.

"For years women have been on hormone therapy. Many, many years and we have not had any studies to indicate, or to show us, or to prove what the use of long-term therapy means for women in terms of our health and in terms of our wellness," says Dr. Vivian Pinn, director of the Office of Research on Women's Health at the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Pinn says it's not just another study. This study finally sheds valuable light on hormone therapy.

"I think there was a fallacy going on that the hormone was going to be the answer to all things. It was going to keep people young and I think that what people have to do is take their own responsibility for their lives and take care of their own body," Lamar says.

And that may well be the biggest lesson for all of us. There are no easy answers and no magic pills. Ultimately we need to make decisions based on the best available science and what we think is best for us.
Researchers say most of the herbal remedies they checked don't ease menopause symptoms, but there are some that apparently do.

Researchers at Columbia and George Washington Universities found plants containing substances similar to the hormone estrogen had apparent benefit.

One researcher says this includes soy products.

She also says the herb black cohosh appeared to work. Other popular herbal treatments, including ginseng, red clover, and oil of evening primrose were found to have no noticeable effect.