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Estrogen
use before 65 linked to reduced risk of
Alzheimer’s disease
Newswise — Women who use hormone therapy before
the age of 65 could cut their risk of developing
Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. This
possibility is raised by research that will be
presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s
59th Annual Meeting in Boston, April 28 – May 5,
2007.
The study found women who used any form of
estrogen hormone therapy before the age of 65
were nearly 50 percent less likely to develop
Alzheimer’s disease or dementia than women who
did not use hormone therapy before age 65.
The study was part of the Women’s Health
Initiative Memory Study, which is a
sub-study of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI),
one of the largest U.S. prevention studies
of postmenopausal women. The study looked at
prior hormone use in 7,153 healthy women
ages 65-79 before they enrolled in the WHI
Memory Study. Researchers followed the
women’s cognitive health over an average of
five years.
In that time, 106 of the women developed
Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. Dementia is a
general term referring to the progressive
decline in a person’s cognitive function.
Dementia can affect memory, attention, language
and problem solving abilities. Alzheimer’s is
the most common type of dementia.
Prior studies have shown that hormone therapy
started during the WHI Memory Study increased a
woman’s chance of dementia. The reduced risk of
dementia was seen only with prior hormone
therapy, used before study enrollment. Reduced
risk was not affected by other examined factors.
“We found that it didn’t matter how old the
woman was when she started hormone therapy, how
long or recently she took it or what kind of
prior therapy she used,” said study author
Victor W. Henderson, MD, of Stanford University
in Palo Alto, CA, and Fellow of the American
Academy of Neurology.
Women who began estrogen-only therapy after the
age of 65 had roughly a 50-percent increased
risk of developing dementia. The risk jumped to
nearly double for women using
estrogen-plus-progestin hormone therapy.
“Further studies are needed to support these
findings and learn more about how hormone
therapy affects the long-term cognitive health
of women who begin use before age 65,” said
Henderson.
The National Institutes of Health and Wyeth
funded the Women’s Health Initiative Memory
Study.
The American Academy of Neurology, an
association of over 20,000 neurologists and
neuroscience professionals, is dedicated to
improving patient care through education and
research. A neurologist is a doctor with
specialized training in diagnosing, treating and
managing disorders of the brain and nervous
system such as Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy,
multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and
stroke.
