Postmenopausal hormone therapy--good for smokers?

In premenopausal women, estrogen therapy has different effects in smokers and nonsmokers. Studies of oral contraceptive pills consistently find that hormone use results in a much higher relative risk for cardiovascular events in smokers than in nonsmokers. For example, in the World Health Organization Collaborative Study of Cardiovascular Disease and Steroid Hormone Contraception, use of oral contraceptives increased risk for myocardial infarction about four-fold among nonsmokers, but more than 20-fold among smokers (1). In this issue of the Journal, Teede et al. (2) present data