Alzheimer’s disease is more common in women. It has been speculated that it is due to our longer life expectancy, or to the hormonal change at menopause. If it were so simple, women would be treated with hormone replacement therapy to prevent this dementia , but there are no studies to support it and it is not a treatment without side effects.
In Finland they have magnificent records of all diseases, and as neurologists this helps us a lot. They have just published a study in Neurology , on 8,195 Finnish women who were between 47 and 56 years old and that after 20 years of follow-up, 227 women were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. No correlation was shown between the use of hormone therapy and the risk of the disease. Only women who had taken hormones for more than ten years were associated with a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s.
These results are in line with the Cache County study, also published in Neurology in 2012, which found a lower risk of Alzheimer’s if hormone treatment began around menopause and continued for more than 10 years.
Personally, I have experienced how my intellectual and work capacity increased during my pregnancies , but as a woman of science, we will have to wait to know more about this question. Meanwhile, training the brain, engaging in stimulating activities, and loving and being loved remains the most effective preventive treatment for cognitive impairment without side effects.
Dra. Cristina Guijarro Castro, advisor to Unobrain (CM Caracas de Madrid and H. Virgen de la Luz, Cuenca)
