I am very excited about a new study reported in the May issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology about the removal of healthy ovaries during a hysterectomy. When I was trained as a surgeon (many, many years ago), we were told you should always remove a woman's ovaries -- assuming she was finished having children -- because they were otherwise useless and would get cancer if left behind.

We did not have very sensitive blood tests for hormones back then, so many thought the ovaries stopped working at menopause and were, therefore, dispensable. I always suspected that that was not true, and would counsel patients and friends to fight for their ovaries.
  
Now we have more sensitive tests and know that the ovaries do, in fact, produce low levels of estrogen postmenopausally. They also continue to produce testosterone and androstenedione, which are converted into estrogen peripherally in our bones, brains, breasts, muscles, fat, and other organs. Even so the practice has persisted that removal of a uterus should always include removal of the ovaries, unless there was a good reason to keep them. 

For the study, William Parker, adjunct faculty member at the John Wayne Cancer Institute in California, and his colleagues looked at all the women in the Nurse's Health Study who had hysterectomies. Their findings show that the women who had their ovaries removed had a higher risk of death from all causes than the women who did not. It is true that there was less ovarian and breast cancer when the ovaries were removed, but that did not outweigh the increase in heart disease, lung cancer, and stroke.
  
The message is clear: Just because the medical profession has not yet figured out why an organ is still there, doesn't mean we should remove it!