Determining the Effects of Hormone Therapy on Memory

Karyn Frick, Ph.D.,Assistant Professor of Psychology

One of the key studies within the NIH-funded Women's Health Initiative suggested that treatment with estrogen and progestin significantly increases the risk of cognitive decline and dementia in postmenopausal women. Those data sharply contrast with studies in women and rodents that have demonstrated a clear ability of estrogen to alleviate age- and hormone-related memory loss. Dr. Frick’s study was designed to determine the effects of estrogen and progesterone on memory.

Highlighted Study Findings

Dr. Frick found in using a mouse model that, to preserve memory, estrogen likely needs to be administered during a critical window – for example, when women are just entering menopause. Such therapy would appear to be of little benefit to women who are well past menopause, and could increase health risks. Building on earlier pilot research, Dr. Frick investigated estrogen relative to a cell-signaling pathway in the hippocampus – an area of the brain critical to learning and memory. Dr. Frick’s lab previously identified this area as crucial to estrogen’s ability to enhance memory. She found that estrogen activated this signaling pathway in the hippocampus and improved the ability of middle-aged female mice to recall objects. However, estrogen had no effect on memory or cell signaling in older female mice. The data support the notion of a window of opportunity early in menopause in which hormone treatment can benefit cognition, and suggest that the failure of estrogen to improve memory in older females may result from dysfunction of specific molecular pathways in the brain.