Postmenopausal Hormone Therapy: The Heart of the Matter In this issue, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force(USPSTF) recommends against using hormone therapy

for the prevention of chronic conditions in postmeno-pausal women (1). These recommendations address only the use of hormones to prevent disease and not their use for symptom management in early menopause. On the basis of a systematic review of evidence published through November 2011 (2), the USPSTF concluded with moder-ate to high certainty that the harms of hormone therapy outweigh the benefits when it is used for chronic disease prevention. However, in the short interval between final-ization and publication of the recommendations, new evi-dence emerged that raised questions about them. DOPS (Danish Osteoporosis Prevention Study), a multicenter randomized trial, reported that hormone therapy given to early postmenopausal women reduced the risk for a com-bined end point of death, myocardial infarction, and hear