Charlie Rose Show features Stefanick
BY BY MARGARITA GALLARDO
It seems like every other week a new study comes out that doesn't jibe with an earlier one's results, presenting scientists with a challenge: How to communicate critical information to the public without causing confusion.
That was the broad issue that Marcia Stefanick, PhD, professor of medicine, addressed on the Charlie Rose Show April 17, as part of a panel on women's health moderated by guest host and NBC health correspondent Robert Bazell.
The news hook was the latest findings from the federally funded Women's Health Initiative: Taking estrogen alone does not increase the risk of breast cancer in postmenopausal women. Those results came on the heels of an earlier WHI trial that reported that a different type of hormone therapy—which combined estrogen and progestin—did result in a higher risk of breast cancer among postmenopausal women.
Stefanick, who is chair of the WHI steering committee, acknowledged that some misunderstood the first set of results, despite the fact that researchers had been clear about their significance. "When we published the estrogen and progestin trial, we said very clearly that it did not apply to the estrogen-only study," she explained. "It did not apply to women who had a hysterectomy who used estrogen early.
"So we tried really hard to get that message out," she added. "It didn't always make it into the sound bites."
When asked how to improve health communication, Stefanick said: "It's great to have longer sound bites so that you can at least get the most important part of the message through—so that people understand that estrogen plus progestin is different from estrogen only, and that the women who take one are different from the women who take the other."
Also on the show were Frances Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, and Clifford Hudis, chief of the breast cancer medicine service at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.