GEE, MESSING WITH CREATION SEEMED SUCH A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME:

Fewer take hormones; breast cancer rate falls: A new report shows that about 14,000 fewer Americans were diagnosed with breast cancer after they stopped taking menopause hormones (MARILYNN MARCHIONE, 12/15/06, Associated Press)

U.S. breast cancer rates plunged an unprecedented 7 percent in 2003, the year after millions of women stopped taking menopause hormones when a study showed the pills raise the risk of tumors.

The startling new analysis, reported Thursday at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, does not prove a link between hormone therapy and breast cancer, but strongly suggests it, many experts said.

''When I saw it, I couldn't believe it,'' statistician Donald Berry of the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston said of the drop.

Cancers take years to form, so going off hormones would not instantly prevent new tumors.

But tumors that had been developing might stop growing, shrink or disappear so they were no longer detected by mammograms, doctors theorized.

Cases dropped most among women 50 and older -- the age group taking hormones. The decline was biggest for tumors whose growth is fueled by estrogen -- the type most affected by hormone use.