Many menopausal women who are afraid that hormone replacement therapy could increase their risk of breast cancer have turned to the herbal supplement black cohosh an alternative in recent years.

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The proof, apparently, that taking hormone replacement therapy does significantly increase the risk of breast cancer.

BBC: Breakfast with Frost

But another explanation could be changes in lifestyle factors which increase the risk of hormone-dependent tumours, such as women having babies at an older age, obesity after menopause and use of hormone replacement therapy.

BBC: Breast cancer biology 'changing'

Yes, this is the same issue that, over the past few years, has plagued drugs that increase the GLP-1 hormone.

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This does not include the price increase to be incurred from changing the percentage of hormone-free milk from 27% to 37%.

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In what is, admittedly, the least-tested part of their thesis, Dr Unger and Dr Scherer argue that other cells react to this increase in leptin concentration by becoming resistant to the hormone's effects.

ECONOMIST: Metabolic syndrome

This is largely due to a decreased use of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which has been shown to increase a woman's risk of developing breast cancer.

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In a paper in the Journal of Immunological Methods, Wendy Dittmer of Philips claims to have achieved a 100, 000-fold increase in detection speed by hurrying magnetically tagged molecules of parathyroid hormone towards the spin valve with an electromagnet instead of allowing them to diffuse there.

ECONOMIST: Labs on a chip

This comes on top of new evidence that Prozac, Paxil and other antidepressants cause suicidal thoughts in children and recent findings that hormone replacement therapy, touted for decades as a panacea for menopause, could increase the risk of heart attacks, strokes, breast cancer and dementia.

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