Estrogen therapy used to treat memory loss

NEW YORK Doctors have been using estrogen drugs in attempts to battle Alzheimer’s disease in women who are either suffering menopause-related memory loss, perimenopause, or post menopause memory loss, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The doctors would prescribe the estrogen drugs to women complaining of memory loss or having trouble summoning up words or losing track of what they were doing. Within a few months, the women could go back to their offices and say they were cured.

“Women have been telling me this for 25 years,” says Elizabeth Lee Vliet, a women’s health physician, who notes that her patients often speak of feeling “fuzzy-headed.” She takes detailed blood tests and typically prescribes 17-beta estradiol, an estrogen replacement approved by the Food and Drug Administration. “They come back a couple weeks later and say ‘It was like someone turned a light bulb on my brain! I can think again!’”

Research has shown that estrogen receptors are throughout the brain, particularly in the areas that govern learning, memory and mood. Estrogen also stimulates the growth of dendritic spines that enable nerve cells to communicate, and increases the level of neurotransmitters, the brain’s chemical messengers.

One prominent study, however, the Women’s Health Initiative Memory Study, has found opposite results. It reported in 2004 that women taking estrogen plus progestin had a higher risk of dementia than those who took a placebo.

This study, though, had subjects who were aged 65 to 79 and were using Premarin, which is a different estrogen than used by other doctors. Also, Premarin has been stated by some experts that it doesn’t work as well as 17-beta estradiol. The age of the women also has worried some experts who said that there is a critical period of about 10 years after menopause when estrogen can protect women’s brains, while beginning to take hormones later can be harmful. Finally, the trial used a measure of cognitive function known as the “modified mini-mental state examination,” which is not sensitive enough to assess any beneficial effects that estrogen might have had on verbal or working memory.

Doctors say that the one question remaining is the length of the course of treatment.