With all the talk going back and forth on hormone replacement therapy, now I have to worry about a shrinking brain too, maybe I wouldn’t remember a stroke? I would really like to one day have the comfort of knowing that HRT does not encourage the growth of cancer, but a smaller brain I guess I could deal with. BD
Two new studies show that commonly prescribed forms of postmenopausal hormone therapy may slightly accelerate the loss of brain tissue in women 65 and older beyond what normally occurs with aging.
The studies' findings appear as companion papers in the Jan. 13 issue of Neurology , the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Both papers report on analyses from the Women's Health Initiative Memory Study, a substudy of the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) landmark Women's Health Initiative (WHI) hormone therapy clinical trials.
Previous studies showed that hormone therapy in the form of conjugated equine estrogens (CEEs), with or without added progestin, increased the likelihood that older women would have difficulty with thinking skills and memory and experience dementia or cognitive impairment. Because these drugs are known to increase women's risk for strokes, it had been assumed that these drugs adversely affected women's memory by increasing the rates of "silent strokes" and brain lesions, changes in tissue that occur when blood flow to an area of the brain is reduced or blocked.
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