Post-Menopausal Women With IBD and Hormone Replacement Therapy

Post-menopausal women with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) who underwent hormone replacement therapy (HRT) showed an improvement in their disease activity based on physician global assessment scores following HRT compared to post-menopausal women with IBD who were not on HRT, according to findings of a study published in The Journal of Clinical Medicine.

For this multicenter, retrospective, case–control cohort study, the researchers included IBD patients who had not undergone HRT as controls. They used the physician global assessment (PGA) score to quantify disease activity.

The team identified 37 women with IBD who were post-menopausal, from the University of Minnesota and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital database between 2000 and 2020.

Women who had a PGA score of ≥2 showed a significant reduction in their scores post HRT treatment (p < 0.01). Also, HRT treatment was associated with 5.6 times increase “in the odds of post-HRT PGA score improvement compared to controls (OR 5.6; 95% CL 1.6, 19.7) in our univariate logistic regression analysis,” the authors said.

“Post-menopausal IBD women who underwent HRT therapy showed an improvement in their disease symptoms following HRT compared to post-menopausal women without HRT therapy, who showed no change,” the study concluded.

Reference:
Freeman M, Lally L, Teigen L, Graziano E, Shivashankar R, Shmidt E. Hormone replacement therapy is associated with disease activity improvement among post-menopausal women with inflammatory bowel disease. Journal of Clinical Medicine. 2024; 13(1):88. https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm13010088