SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Oncol.
Sec. Gynecological Oncology
Volume 15 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fonc.2025.1621570
The effect of hormone replacement therapy on cervical cancer risk in perimenopausal women: a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies
Provisionally accepted
- Yunnan Cancer Hospital, Kunming, China
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Background Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) alleviates menopausal symptoms in perimenopausal women and help improve their quality of life, but its increased risk of cervical cancer (CC) remains to be evaluated.A system review and meta-analysis was conducted to retrieve literature related to HRT and CC risk by searching Pubmed, Embase, Science Direct, Web of Science, and Google Scholar databases. After screening the literature according to inclusion criteria and assessing the risk of bias using the Newcastle Ottawa Scale, the odd ratio (OR) values of HRT relative to CC were pooled.Results A total of 9 articles were included in this study, including 5 cohort studies and 4 case control studies. The sample size of perimenopausal women in the literature ranged from 60 to 584,742. The overall quality of the literature was good. The meta-analysis results showed that HRT (current and persist use) had a reduced risk for CC (OR=0.70, 95% confidence interval (CI) [0.58, 0.85]), an increased risk for any cytological abnormality related to CC (OR=1.38, 95% CI [1.22, 1.55]), also an increased risk for adenocarcinoma of CC (OR=1.82, 95% CI [0.91,3.65]), but a decreased risk for squamous cell carcinoma of CC (OR=0.74, 95% CI [0.57, 0.96]). The subtype was a significant source of heterogeneity in this meta-analysis.HRT does not increase the overall risk of cervical cancer, but it increases the risk of cervical adenocarcinoma subtype and is associated with the risk of cancer-related cytological lesions.
Keywords: Perimenopausal women, Hormone Replacement Therapy, cervical cancer, systematic review and meta-analysis, risk
Received: 01 May 2025; Accepted: 23 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhou, Wei and Ruan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Youqin Ruan, Yunnan Cancer Hospital, Kunming, China
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