Hormone Therapy May Protect Against Alzheimer's

But it only helped women younger than 65, preliminary study found.

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter
Wednesday, May 2, 2007; 12:00 AM

Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

WEDNESDAY, May 2 (HealthDay News) -- Women who start hormone therapy earlier in life -- before they turn 65 -- could cut their risk of developing Alzheimer's or another dementia, a new study suggests.

This stands in contrast to findings on using hormone replacement therapy (HRT) after age 65, which appears to increase the risk of dementia.

"The magnifying glass has moved slightly earlier, and it looks like, if women started taking HRT early, they did show a decreased risk of Alzheimer's," said Dr. Sam Gandy, chairman of the Alzheimer's Association's medical and scientific advisory council, and director of the Farber Institute for Neurosciences at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.

But the study authors urged caution in interpreting the findings.

"The findings are of interest to the research community. It's harder to say how they should inform or dictate clinical practice," said Dr. Victor Henderson, presenting author and a professor of health research and policy and neurology and neurological science at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. "Our findings suggest that more research needs to be done looking at the late consequences of early hormone therapy. The analyses are observational, which are weaker than experimental, so there's room for error. Be cautious with the clinical implications."

Henderson was expected to present the findings Wednesday at the American Academy of Neurology annual meeting, in Boston.

Hormone therapy in older women seems to increase the risk for different dementias. But, in younger postmenopausal women, the relationship between hormone therapy and Alzheimer's disease is less clear.

Previous research had suggested that low levels of estrogen in the brain may raise the risk for developing Alzheimer's, which could be an argument for using HRT.

For the new research, part of the Women's Health Initiative Memory Study, 7,153 women aged 65 to 79 without dementia provided information on past hormone therapy exposure.

Women who reported using any form of estrogen hormone therapy before they turned 65 were nearly 50 percent less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease or another dementia than women who did not use such therapy by that age.