"We always had breakfast and good food to eat and cod liver oil," Speight says.

To continue that legacy, Speight, 89, of Madisonville, signed up for the Women's Health Initiative. She's one of more than 3,000 women in the region who volunteered to participate in the landmark study of postmenopausal women.

Now Speight and the other 100,000-plus women who signed up nationally are being asked to extend their participation for a five-year follow-up study.

The study's major findings - that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) doesn't offer the health benefits experts thought, and actually increases the risk of some diseases - have been well-publicized.

But the Women's Health Initiative, launched in 1991, won't officially wrap up until next year, when researchers announce the findings of the final two arms of the study - one looking at the benefits of a low-fat diet, the other looking at the benefits of calcium and vitamin D.

Then the study, sponsored nationally by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, enters the follow-up phase.

Dr. Margery Gass, a University of Cincinnati obstetrician/gynecologist and principal investigator for the study in Cincinnati, says participants in the follow-up will be asked to fill out an annual questionnaire about major health events, such as heart attack.

The continuing phases will look at whether a low-fat diet helps reduce the risk of colon cancer and heart disease, and whether calcium helps reduce the risk of bone fracture and colon cancer.

The major findings from the hormone therapy segments of the study - one involving estrogen alone and the other a combination of estrogen plus progesterone - were a shock for many women and clinicians.

The major finding from the hormone replacement therapy research was that it didn't protect against heart disease and, in fact, increased the risk of stroke, dementia and blood clots.

The Food and Drug Administration continues to recommend that HRT be prescribed only to treat menopause-related symptoms, Gass says.

The data collected from the Women's Health Initiative will be a "massive" resource for future research, Gass adds.

"This is a real legacy that these women have left us," the doctor says.

"There's a wealth of data spanning 10 to 15 years and there are blood samples that people can look at to see if there are predictors for why someone had certain events."

E-mail pofarrell@enquirer.com