HRT Litigation: An Alternate Cause or Perhaps an Explanation
In the hormone replacement therapy litigation there's obviously a fight over whether estrogen caused the plaintiff's breast cancer. Is the demarcation simply a line between those breast cancers fueled by estrogen and those that aren't? If so, are there alternate causes of estrogen-fueled breast cancers?
What about human papillomavirus? It's been identified as the cause of cervical as well as head and neck cancers. Now HPV has been suggested as a cause of breast cancer. http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/6605282a.html
But is HPV a cause independent of estrogen or does estrogen facilitate whatever HPV does that leads to breast cancer? And if it's the latter, how do you sort out causation?