 |
| Menopause symptoms |
Menopause Symptoms and Memory Loss
When you enter menopause, you may experience hot flashes and mood swings, the one thing you can't blame on "change" is memory loss.
In the latest study, which reveals the reason for reduced ability to recall menopause, Taiwanese researchers compared the memory of hundreds of women with any menopausal symptoms in their memory before entering menopause.
They found that women undergoing the menopause process performed five different cognitive function tests simultaneously. The results of the study are to be presented at the annual meeting of the American Neurological Association in Toronto on 4 October.
"When women go to perimenopause, they don't have to worry about cognitive decline," said Dr. Jong-ling Fu, a physician attending Taipei Veterans General Hospital and at Yang-Ming University School of Medicine Is an associate professor.
The researchers said that the myth of memory loss during menopause is the assumption that some women as they go through menopause feel that their memory is not as sharp as before. Studies show that hormone replacement therapy can protect against dementia, reinforcing this belief. However, a later study found that in older women, hormone replacement therapy not only helped protect women from dementia, but may actually increase the risk.
To try to answer the question of whether menopause had any effect on memory, Fu and his colleagues studied about 700 pre-menopausal women living on a group of rural islands between Taiwan and China. The Taiwanese government had restricted access to these islands until the 1990s, so the authors reported that the study population was almost homogeneous, which would help to exclude possible potential factors for memory loss.
The age of the women was between 40 and 54 years. None of them underwent hysterectomy and none underwent hormone replacement therapy during the study.
All performed five cognitive tests designed to assess their memory and cognitive skills at the beginning of the study, and again 18 months later.
During the study period, menopausal symptoms started appearing in 23 percent of women.
The researchers then compared the memory of women entering menopause who did not do so and found very little difference. In four of the five tests, there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups of women.
 |
| Memory Loss |
The difference in only one test was statistically significant, and this difference, Fu said, was very slight. This test was designed to assess verbal memory and show 70 nonsignificant figures to women. Some data were replicated during testing, while most were not. The women were asked if they had seen this figure before.
"For women, menopause does not mean that you will develop memory loss," Dr. Raina Ernstoff said as an attending neurologist at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan. Said, you may feel hot and have trouble sleeping, which may temporarily affect your cognitive skills.
Obstetrician Dr. of New York University Medical Center, New York City. Steven Goldstein said, "I don't think that decreasing estrogen levels leads to memory loss." "It's not like your memory is cutting together, healing and then it takes a big dive during menopause, like bone density can."
Both Ernstoff and Goldstein stated that they did not know of many women who believed that menopause could lead to significant memory loss. He also felt that the results from this group of women who were so homogeneous might not apply to different groups of women, such as those living in more industrial societies. And he said that other factors that were not studied may play a role in memory loss, such as hypertension, which may contribute to vascular morbidity.
Ernstoff also pointed out that education background can play a large role in memory loss. Fuh acknowledges that the researchers attempted to control the data for educational differences.
Image source: unsplash.com
