Menopausal Hormone Therapy and Cardiovascular Disease Risk: Utility of Biomarkers and Clinical Factors for Risk Stratification

continues to have a clinical role in symptom manage-ment, but identifying women for whom benefits will outweigh the risks remains a challenge. Although hor-mone therapy (HT) is the most effective strategy for ameliorating vasomotor and other symptoms, random-ized clinical trials showanunfavorable balance of benefits and risks formanywomen.However, closer examination of data from these trials suggests that itmay be possible to classify women as better or worse candidates for HT by using individual risk stratification. CONTENT: Data from 2 landmark trials—the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) and the Heart and Estrogen/ progestin Replacement Study (HERS)—suggest an im-portant role for clinical characteristics, serum bio-markers, genomic markers, and gene–environmen