Postmenopausal hormone therapy initiation before and after the Women's Health Initiative in two French cohorts.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to describe the evolution of hormone therapy (HT) initiation among newly postmenopausal women after the release of the first results from the Women's Health Initiative trial (July 2002).

Methods: We used data from two French prospective cohorts, E3N and GAZEL. We identified 3,364 women with natural menopause onset occurring before 2002 and 1,880 women with menopause onset occurring after 2002.