Could Estrogen Prevent Alzheimer's?

Ivanhoe Newswire
Thursday, May 3, 2007; 12:00 AM

By Andrea Hughes, Ivanhoe Health Correspondent

ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- According to a new study, women who used estrogen before menopause may have a decreased risk for developing Alzheimer's disease.

The study revealed women who did not use some form of estrogen hormone therapy before age 65 were almost 50 percent more likely to develop Alzheimer's or dementia than women who used estrogen therapy. The study was part of the Women's Health Initiative Memory Study and was one of the largest prevention studies of postmenopausal women in the United States.

The 7,153 women observed were between ages 65 and 79 and healthy before they enrolled in the study. Researchers followed the women for five years. In that time, 106 women developed some kind of dementia or Alzheimer's disease.

This study is contrary to previous studies that inferred hormone therapy increased a woman's risk for dementia. Researchers saw the reduced risk was not influenced by other factors and was only present in those with prior hormone therapy use before the study's enrollment. Ron Petersen, M.D., speaking on behalf of the American Academy of Neurology, told Ivanhoe, "Estrogen may have a variable effect on the likelihood of producing dementia or Alzheimer's disease down the road as a function of when it's taken in the woman's lifespan."

The researchers found women who began taking hormone therapy after age 65 had an increased risk of developing dementia. For women using estrogen-only therapy, the risk was 50 percent higher and jumped to nearly double that for those women using estrogen-plus-progestin hormone therapy. Dr. Petersen says more research is needed on this subject but speculates about these findings. He says, "It's probably an interaction of disease progression, aging phenomena and what estrogen does in the brain."

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SOURCE: Presented at the American Academy of Neurology 's 59th Annual Meeting in Boston, April 28-May 5, 2007.