Estrogen therapy may help prevent memory decline in eld...( Normal aging does not affect immedia...)

"Normal aging does not affect immediate memory in older people. It functions as well as it did when they were 30 years of age. The same goes for remote memory," says Barbara Sherwin, Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Obstetrics and Gynecology at McGill University. "However," specifies the founder and co-director of the McGill Menopause Clinic at the Royal Victoria Hospital," our capacity to learn - to code new information, to consolidate and retrieve it - that decreases with aging. Our studies have found that estrogen replacement therapy prevents some of the decline in the ability to learn and to remember new material in postmenopausal women. "

Mens and womens bodies make both estrogen and androgen, albeit in different quantities. The ovaries make over 90% of the estrogen in women and, after the menopause, they are unable to produce it any longer. Although mens glands make only small amounts of estrogen, an enzyme converts some of their testosterone into estrogen. Also, men continue to produce testosterone lifelong, although in smaller amounts as they age, while menopause puts an end to womens reproductive hormone production in their early fifties. This affects, among other things, verbal memory for the latter one-third of their lifespan.

In 1988, Dr. Sherwin published the first hard evidence that estrogen maintains verbal memory and enhances the capacity for new learning in postmenopausal women. Later, she showed that estrogen replacement therapy had the same effect on women in their late thirties and early forties who suffered a sudden drop in circulating levels of estrogen after their ovaries and uterus had been surgically removed. "Women who were given a placebo after their surgery complained of not being able to remember things, of having to make lists, which they never needed to do in the past, and also had lower scores on tests of verbal memory," said Dr. Sherwin. "On the other hand, women who were randomly treated with estrogen posto
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Contact: Barbara Sherwin
bsherwin@ego.psych.mcgill.ca
514-398-6087
McGill University
10-Oct-2000