In fact, long-term use of Prempro seemed to increase the risk of those diseases.
Pfizer manufactured the combination drug Prempro, one of the drugs in the 2002 study.
Any differences between the two groups--like the increased risk of heart attack--could therefore be directly attributed to Prempro.
The drugmaker said Prempro might not prevent Alzheimer's, which conflicts with other studies.
The most common was a pill called Prempro, made by American Home Products, which is now part of Pfizer.
In the WHI study, tens of thousands of patients were randomly assigned to either take Prempro or a sugar pill.
Premarin differs from Prempro and Premphase in that it contains only estrogen, rather than a combination of estrogens and progesterone.
Since the WHI results were unveiled in July, other drug companies have tried to grab patients who have stopped taking Prempro.
Use of Prempro is mostly restricted to counteracting the symptoms of menopause.
The Women's Health Initiative, a study conducted by the National Institutes of Health, released the bad news about Prempro nearly three months ago.
Unless estrogen is given with progestin (the two hormones are combined in the Prempro pill), it may hike the risk of uterine cancer.
Another study from 2010 indicated that Prempro not only can cause cancer but leads to types of cancers more likely to cause death.
Nevertheless, that study, as far as I know, only evaluated patients taking just the, you know, the classic Prempro or Premarin kinds of drugs.
Some analysts argue that as Prempro itself only accounts for a small part of the company's earnings, the market is overreacting to the news.
Riccardo, a sell-side analyst at Bear Stearns, thinks Prempro sales have already bottomed out, and that the changes to the label won't further hurt sales.
Until the results are published in a medical journal, it is impossible to judge whether Prempro sales, which have already been hit hard, will decrease even more.
Sales of Premarin and Prempro have slowed since a large government-run study testing Prempro was halted because it found that the medicine increased the risk of breast cancer.
In July, a U.S. government study found that long-term use of one hormone treatment, Prempro, brought with it greater risks of heart disease and breast cancer than doctors had expected.
But under the glare of the gigantic Prempro trial--part of a set of studies, called the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), run by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)--those benefits evaporated.
By comparison, the big government study enrolled women and randomly assigned Prempro to one half, and placebo to the other half, resulting in two groups that were indistinguishable from one another.
Sales of Prempro, previously a perennial moneymaker, dropped precipitously.
Some doctors have said that they believe many of the problems seen in the earlier trial may be specific to Prempro, and that other hormone replacement regimens might have different risks and benefits.
Many of the benefits that had been found for Prempro in the early studies, it turned out, were really just differences between the people who chose to take the pill and those who did not.
By comparison, the Women's Health Initiative study, which caused sales of Wyeth 's (nyse: WYE - news - people ) Prempro hormone replacement pill to plummet 40%, is as solid as medical research can be.
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