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• Posted June 4, 2026

Menopause Hormone Therapy Use Drops Sharply Across United States

Fewer women affected by menopause are turning to hormone therapy to ease their symptoms, a new study says.

Hormone therapy use declined from 4.4% in 2007 to 1.7% in 2023 among women 40 and older, researchers report in the June issue of the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

Even among women most likely to benefit – those 50 to 59 – only about 3.5% used hormone therapy in 2023, researchers found.

"We have strong evidence that hormone therapy is safe and effective for many women, but that hasn't translated into how it's used in clinical practice," lead researcher Dr. Stephanie Faubion said in a news release. She's director of Mayo Clinic's Center for Women's Health.

Researchers had expected hormone therapy use to increase in recent years, given increased awareness of both menopause and treatments that can ease its symptoms.

Instead, rates remain at their lowest level since the early 2000s, after a clinical trial called the Women’s Health Initiative first raised concerns about hormone therapy for menopause, researchers said.

That trial’s results, released in 2002, “said, you know what, hormone therapy is not as safe as we thought,” Faubion explained during an earlier interview with HealthDay TV. “And it not only does not prevent chronic disease, it can actually increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.”

Later re-analysis of the clinical trial’s data found that for many women, hormone therapy could be used without any dire consequences.

“Eventually they broke down the data by age, and what we ended up finding out is for those women in their 50s, hormone therapy was actually pretty safe,” Faubion told HealthDay TV. “And for those women, the risk of heart attack and stroke is quite rare anyway, because these are younger women.”

But by then the word was out, and hormone therapy has been considered risky for aging women ever since.

For the new study, researchers tracked nationwide trends in hormone therapy use among women 40 and older between 2007 and 2023, using medical and pharmacy claims data from a large U.S. health database.

Results also showed that hormone therapy use was consistently higher among white women compared with Black, Hispanic and Asian American women.

Ongoing misconceptions about risk likely are keeping women from seeking hormone therapy, along with doctors who haven’t been well-trained regarding menopause and its treatments, researchers said.

"Despite increased attention on menopause, we still have a long way to go," Faubion said in the release. "Improving education for both patients and clinicians will be key to closing this gap."

More information

The Menopause Society has more about hormone therapy.

SOURCES: Mayo Clinic, news release, June 1, 2026; HealthDay TV interview, April 27, 2026