Welcome to paging Dr. Gupta.

I like to think of this as office hours.

You get to pay me a visit, I get to hear what's on your mind, and we dig into the health topics you care the most about.

You've been sending in a lot of great questions and comments lately. I really appreciate it.

Today we want to tackle a few that feel particularly relevant and newsworthy.

You've probably seen the headlines.

FDA announcing that it's planning on dropping the black box warning on hormone treatments for women with menopause symptoms.

It's referred to as H.R.T. Hormone replacement therapy. Some refer to it as M.H.T. Menopausal hormone

therapy. Now, hormone therapy involves taking medications that contain hormones, obviously. Oftentimes, estrogen and progesterone. Why? To replace those that the body stops making after menopause.

When you go through menopause, the body stops making certain hormones.

Hormone replacement therapy was designed to replace them.

Now, a couple things about the black box warning.

It is the strongest type of alert that the FDA puts on a drug label.

About 400 drugs actually carry this type of warning. And for context, there's about 4,000

FDA approved drugs. So about 10% carry black box warnings. Though hormone therapy has been on the

market for decades, what happened in 2003 after the Black Box warning was added was that prescriptions plummeted.

Before the Black Box warning, about one in four women were taking hormone replacement therapy or hormone therapy, and then it plummeted to about 1 in 25, plummeted more than 70%.

Now, what was happening at that time? Well, there was a large government-funded study called the

Women's Health Initiative, and some of the early results were announced. In it, they found that

women taking hormones after menopause did have higher cancer and cardiovascular risks compared

with women who took a placebo. The study participants had an average age of 63. That's important.

We're going to come back to that. Point being that many of these women were well-passed

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