Study: Hormone Replacement Therapy Might Shrink Brains

[steaner]

A new study is showing negative effects of a once-popular therapy for postmenopausal women, leading some to wonder how it might affect younger women still using the treatment.
Two new papers suggest that postmenopausal hormone therapy may impair mental function in women by reducing the size of certain areas of their brains.
(ABC News)

The National Institutes of Health study looked at women from the Women's Health Initiative Memory Study, which is a subset of the largest study of hormone replacement therapy. The study found that, overall, women taking the hormones had smaller frontal brain lobes than women who did not follow the treatment.
"Older women who took these [hormones] ... they had greater brain atrophy in these brain regions that are critical for the maintenance of memories," said Susan Resnick, a senior investigator at the National Institute on Aging, Laboratory of Personality and Cognition, and the study's primary author.
Hormone replacement therapy, a regimen of progestin and estrogen given to relieve symptoms of menopause, initially fell from favor in 2002 when the Women's Health Initiative Memory Study was stopped because of concerns that the treatment was putting the women involved at greater risk for stroke and heart problems