2024 – study at the University of Calgary

(Calgary) A University of Calgary study suggests that severe menopause symptoms may be warning signs of dementia.

D^r Zahinoor Ismail, professor of psychiatry, neurology, epidemiology and pathology at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, said the findings came from an ongoing cross-sectional study of the brain and aging in Canadians as part of CAN-PROTECT.

D^r Ismail said his first interest in the effects of menopause came from his medical practice years ago.

“I remember a case in early 2001 with a woman who came to the emergency room with multiple cognitive and psychiatric brain symptoms. It turned out she was in early menopause,” he told The Canadian Press.

“So instead of treating her for neurological and psychiatric problems, we normalized her estrogen and her symptoms disappeared. This is the genesis of the research,” said the doctor.^r Ismail.

The overall study will involve 2,400 people across Canada and will be asked a series of questions about cognition, behavior, function, health, well-being, lifestyle, diet, exercise, vitamin supplements, their medications, medical and psychiatric problems, and their quality of life. of life.

Data from 800 of these subjects will be used to study the effects of menopause on the brain. A background paper on these data was presented at the Canadian Dementia Conference in Toronto in November. Results must be updated annually.

“We took postmenopausal women and recorded the number of symptoms they had during menopause (…) So from hot flashes that people talk about, to neuropsychiatric symptoms like irritability, mood swings, anxiety, and then neurocognitive symptoms like inattention and poor memory, ” a- Did he talk about D?^r Ismail.

“I focused on neuropsychiatric and cognitive symptoms. Because if they appear and persist in midlife and beyond, they are risk factors for dementia.

“What we found was that the more menopausal symptoms they had, the more they suffered and the more symptoms they had,” she added.

D^r Ismail also found that if postmenopausal women received estrogen therapy, they had fewer neuropsychiatric symptoms compared to those who did not.

Previous studies showing that hormone replacement therapy increased the risk of stroke by about a third — later overestimated — have left an entire generation of women missing out on its benefits, he said.

“There has been a backlash against offering hormone replacement therapy to postmenopausal women again.

“There's clearly a resurgence of interest, and it's reflected in my clinical experience and our research data,” said Dr.^r Ismail.