Chicago ? Two months after concluding that estrogen replacement isn’t bad for women’s hearts, government researchers said Tuesday that it doesn’t cause breast cancer, either. And for some women, estrogen actually reduced the risk of breast cancer.

The new analysis of results from the government-sponsored Women’s Health Initiative was published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

The paper confirmed what the WHI investigators first reported two years ago: Estrogen does not cause breast cancer. In fact, there were fewer cases of breast cancer among women who took estrogen, but researchers noted that the difference was not statistically significant.

But in the new study, when the researchers excluded women who stopped taking their pills, the benefit was significant: Women who took estrogen had a 33 percent lower risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer.