Stress could be to blame

2003-09-23 12:11

Chicago - A new study disputes the widely held notion that menopause makes women scatterbrained and forgetful.

Researchers conducted periodic memory tests on 803 menopausal women over two years and found to their surprise that their memories were just fine. In fact, the women's scores improved slightly over time; the researchers were expecting a decline.

The researchers said that if menopausal women are forgetful sometimes, it is probably not because of any harmful hormonal changes in the brain, but because they are busy, distracted and stressed-out dealing with the ordinary pressures of midlife.

"We are not saying that the forgetfulness is all in their heads," said lead researcher Peter M Meyer, a biostatistician at Rush University Medical Centre in Chicago.

"The question we were trying to answer was: Is this forgetfulness reflective of something bigger, below the surface," such as the onset of mental decline?

Many women complain that they become more forgetful after menopause and some doctors have come to believe that the hormonal changes brought on by menopause are the reason.

Naturally occurring oestrogen is thought to help keep brain cells healthy, but it drops during menopause. In fact, the hormone supplement industry was built partly on the premise that oestrogen pills could keep women's minds sharp - an idea that has recently been challenged.

Due to stresses

The new study appears in Tuesday's issue of the journal Neurology.

"It may be that the brain does not need the hormones as much as we think," Russel Thompson of the South Texas Veterans Health Care System wrote in an accompanying commentary.

Other research has suggested that midlife forgetfulness might be due to stresses such as children becoming teenagers and parents dying. Meyer said those stresses, rather than true mental decline, could account for what some women describe as memory loss.

Dr Sam Gandy, a neurologist at Thomas Jefferson University, said the study is "reassuring in the short term" but does not settle whether the hormonal changes in menopause might hasten mental decline and lead to Alzheimer's disease later on.

The brain processes involved in Alzheimer's typically begin at least 10 years before symptoms occur, so the Chicago women would need to be followed longer to see if the early results hold up, said Gandy, a scientific adviser to the Alzheimer's Association.

The study involved white and black women from Chicago ages 42 to 52, most of whom had not yet reached complete menopause, meaning they still menstruated occasionally, though their bodies were producing dwindling levels of oestrogen and progestin hormones.

The participants were not taking hormone supplements, which were recently linked to an increased risk of dementia in older women.

The women were given two standard memory tests every year and were followed for an average of a little more than two years.

On one test asking them to reverse a string of numbers from memory, scores improved by an average of about 3%.

On the other test, women had 90 seconds to read rows of symbols and recall numbers previously assigned to each symbol. Those scores improved by an average of about 8 percent for pre-menopausal women. They declined slightly for postmenopausal women, but no more than would be expected with normal ageing, Meyer said.

On the net:

Neurology

- AP