The Division of Preventive Medicine was one of the vanguard centers for the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), a set of three nationwide, multi-center, randomized trials initiated by the National Institutes of Health to assess the benefits and risks of menopausal hormone therapy, low-fat diet, and calcium-vitamin D supplementation in postmenopausal women aged 50 to 79 years. The randomized trials included 68,000 participants nationwide. Although the randomized trials have been completed, the women are now being followed to examine their long-term health outcomes. In addition, an observational component of the WHI is tracking the health experiences of another 93,000 participants to identify risk factors for disease in older women. The total number of women enrolled in the WHI cohort nationwide was ~161,000.
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