( Estrogen therapy may protect the aging ...)Estrogen Therapy Protects Against Fading Mental Powers: Study,Health

Estrogen therapy may protect the aging brain cells of post-menopausal women if it's given early enough, said a study released Monday that is likely to further stir the debate over hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

The study suggests that estrogen protects the neurons in the post-menopausal female brain from inevitable, age-related deterioration if it is given around the time of perimenopause - the period before menopause when production of the sex hormones estrogen and progesterone begins to ease off.

The findings indicate that the debate on the potential benefits of HRT is not over yet, said John Morrison, a professor in the department of neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

"There's been a great deal of confusion as to whether estrogen helps or harms post-menopausal women, and our findings tell us that there is a very critical window of opportunity in which estrogen therapy may be helpful," he said.

For their experiment, Morrison and a team of colleagues tested the effect of supplemental estrogen, or estradiol, on a group of four rhesus monkeys, whose menstrual cycle and menopause are similar to those of humans.

All of the monkeys had their ovaries removed to induce menopause. The researchers then divided them into four groups: two with young rhesus monkeys, two with older monkeys.

One cohort of each age group was given an estrogen shot every 21 days for a period of two years. The others did not get additional hormones of any kind.

On short-term memory tests, the younger animals performed equally well, regardless of whether they got estrogen or not, but it was an entirely different story in the older animals.

The older rhesus monkeys that got the estrogen boosters performed as well as the younger animals, whereas the older untreated monkeys displayed dramatic cognitive declines, the paper said.

Autopsies showed
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