Menopause Symptoms and Memory Loss

...can't blame it on menopause

Memory loss is something you cannot blame on the changes that come with the miserable hot flashes and mood swings associated withy menopause. Taiwanese researchers conducted a study and they compared the memory of hundreds of women before they had the menopausal symptoms to their memory as they entered menopause.

As a result of these study menopause is no longer considered a cause for inability to recall. These researchers found that women in various stages of menopause scored as well or almost as well on five different tests. The results will be published October 4 at the American Neurological Association annual meeting in Toronto.

As per Dr. Jong Ling Fuh, an attending physician at Taipei Veterans General Hospital and associate professor at Yang Ming University School of Medicine - “When women go into perimenopause, they don’t need to worry about cognitive decline”.

The researchers suggesting that the myth of memory loss during menopause is just a perception women will have because as they went thru menopause they noticed that their memory is not as good as it was before. Also some studies that were suggesting that hormone replacement therapy can protect against dementia helped sustain their believe. Later on, another fairly large study found that in older women, hormone replacement therapy actually can increased the risk of dementia and not reduce it.

Fuh and her colleagues conducted a study on 700 premenopausal women to see if she can link menopause with memory loss. These women were living on rural islands between Taiwan and China, where the access was restricted by the government until the 1990s, so the study group was pretty homogeneous, and potential memory loss factors can be ruled out.

The women were between the ages of 40 and 54 with no hysterectomy and no hormone replacement therapy administered during the length of the study. All the women were given five cognitive tests to assess their memory at the beginning of the study and then again after 18 month. 23% of the women were starting to have symptoms of menopause during the study.

The memory of the women who entered menopause was compared with the one of the women who did not and almost no difference was found. The two groups scored statistically same results in four of the five tests. Fuh reported that only one test had some statistical differences but very slight. This test was assessing verbal memory and also involved showing 70 nonsensical figures. During the test some figures were repeated and some not. The women were asked if they saw the figures earlier.

Dr. Raina Ernstoff, an attending neurologist at William Beaumont Hospital says:”For women, menopause does not mean you’ll develop memory loss”. Perimenopausal symptoms like hot flashes can disturb your sleeping patterns, make you feel bad and subsequently can affect your cognitive skills.

“I don’t think declining estrogen levels are what causes memory loss”, said Dr. Steven Goldstein, an obstetrician/gynecologist at New York University Medical Center in New York. “It’s not like your memory is bopping along, doing fine and then takes this big dive during menopause, like bone density can.”

Both Ernstoff and Goldstein said that don’t know lots of women who think that menopause can cause memory loss. Also they think that Fuh’s results may not apply to women who live in more industrialized areas. They both said that factors like hypertension can contribute to dementia and these factors were not studied. Ernstoff highlighted that educational background can be important in memory loss. Fuh did acknowledge that they tried to control de data for educational differences.

Menopause and Memory Loss SOURCES: Jong-Ling Fuh, M.D., attending physician, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, and associate professor, Yang-Ming University School of Medicine, Taipei, Taiwan; Steven Goldstein, M.D., obstetrician/gynecologist, New York University Medical Center, and professor, obstetrics/gynecology, New York University School of Medicine, New York City; Raina Ernstoff, M.D., attending neurologist, William Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak, Mich., and member, Alzheimer's Board of Detroit; Oct. 4, 2004, presentation, American Neurological Association, Toronto.