Estrogen therapy may help prevent memory decline in eld...( peratively maintained their scores on t...)

This spring, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (successor to the Medical Research Council of Canada) awarded a 5-year Distinguished Scientist Award in the Health Research category to Barbara Sherwin for her studies of steroid hormones and cognitive function in older women . She plans now to investigate the possible role of testosterone, another hormone also produced by the ovaries, on aspects of cognition in women.

Although her research findings have shown that estrogen protects against some decline in explicit memory in healthy aging women, Dr. Sherwin cautions that does not mean that it will cure Alzheimers Disease. "There is little or no evidence so far that estrogen can reverse the memory loss that occurs in Alzheimers Disease, possibly because these women have already lost too many brain cells by the time a diagnosis has been made. However, several studies have shown that estrogen replacement therapy reduces the incidence of Alzheimers Disease in older women," said Dr. Sherwin.

Dr. Sherwin is a member of the external advisory board of the Womens Health Initiative Memory Study, a large longitudinal study funded by the U. S. National Institutes of Health involving 26 clinical sites across the United States. In 1995-1996, 10,000 women over the age of 69 were randomly assigned to treatment with estrogen or placebo for 9 years to determine whether estrogen reduces the incidence of Alzheimers Disease. "In 2005, we should know whether or not estrogen replacement therapy indeed delays the onset of Alzheimers Disease in aging women," concludes Dr Sherwin.

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Contact: Barbara Sherwin
bsherwin@ego.psych.mcgill.ca
514-398-6087
McGill University
10-Oct-2000