Starting hormone replacement therapy sooner rather than later could be the key to helping women keep their memory sharp well into their senior years.
So say researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, where animal studies showed the younger you are when you start oestrogen therapy, the more likely you are to reap the memory-related benefits of this hormone.
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Two kinds of changes might augment memory: one is the actual structural change in the number of connections between nerve cells (synapses) and the other is a change in the biochemistry of what happens at the site of nerve connections, says study author John Morrison, professor and director of the centre for neurobiology at Mount Sinai.
"What we found was that the young animals actually showed an increase in the number of synapses in response to oestrogen, which is about the most profound change that you can have with respect to memory," Morrison explains.
In the younger rats, says Morrison, oestrogen played a role in creating new message centres and increasing the amount of neurochemicals available for cell communication.
The findings don't surprise Dr Michele Warren.
As director of the Centre for Menopause and Hormonal Disorders in New York, she sees a similar pattern in the effects of oestrogen on women, not just with memory but also with other benefits that include protection against cardiovascular disease.
"Starting hormone replacement therapy before rather than after menopause does seem to have more benefit for many women - it seems that the most beneficial effects of oestrogen are largely preventive in nature. So the sooner you begin taking it, the more likely you may be able to prevent some types of damage that leads to disease," says Warren.
The study appeared in the July 3 issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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