UCalgary study links menopause to dementia

A University of Calgary study suggests that severe menopause symptoms may act as early warning signs of dementia.

Dr. Zahinoor Ismail, professor of psychiatry, neurology, epidemiology and pathology at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, said the findings came from CAN-PROTECT, an ongoing cross-sectional study of the Canadian brain and aging.

According to Ismail, his first interest in the effects of menopause arose in his medical practice several years ago.

“I remember a case in early 2001 where a woman came to the emergency room with a lot of cognitive and psychiatric brain symptoms, and she was just in early menopause,” Ismail told The Canadian Press.

“So instead of treating her for neurological and psychiatric conditions, we normalized her estrogen and her symptoms went away.

“That was the genesis of this study.”

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

Data from 800 of these subjects will be used to study the effects of menopause on the brain. A key paper on these data was presented at the Canadian Dementia Conference in Toronto in November, and the results are updated annually.

“We took postmenopausal women and quantified the symptoms they had during menopause … so from the hot flashes that people talk about, to neuropsychiatric symptoms like irritability, mood swings, anxiety, and then neurocognitive symptoms like inattention and deterioration. memory,” he said.

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

“What we found was that the more menopausal symptoms they had, the worse they got and the more symptoms they had.”

Ismail also found that if postmenopausal women received estrogen-based treatment during menopause, they had fewer neuropsychiatric symptoms compared to those who did not.

She said earlier studies showing that hormone replacement therapy increased the risk of stroke by about a third, and later by more than that, had deprived an entire generation of women of the benefits.

“There has been an upheaval with the promotion of offering hormone replacement therapy to menopausal women again,” he said.

“Once again, the growing interest was clear, and it was reflected in my clinical experience and in our research data.”