Estrogen and Cogntive Improvement : Pure Pedantry

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Jake Young is a MD/PhD student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in NYC getting a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience. He holds a BS and MS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University. If a volcano were to erupt Pompei-style in Central Park, his body would be preserved in a scoliotic posture over his lab desk. Archeaologists would later conclude that he spent most of his day training rats to perform tricks, until he went blind building electrical equipment by hand using a dissecting microscope. But, still, he died happy...because science is cool.

Pure Pedantry is a blog about science -- social sciences and otherwise -- as well as academic and scientific culture. No one can live on science alone, so I also like to dwell on pop culture, periodically explore the humanities, and indulge in other types of geeky goodness.

DISCLAIMERS: 1) Jake Young is not a licensed physician (yet). He is merely a medical student. The information published on this site is not intended for use in medical decision-making. Please seek advice from a licensed, medical professional before making any health decisions. 2) The opinions expressed are my own. They do not represent the views of SEED magazine or the educational establishments I currently attend or attended in the past.

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Estrogen and Cogntive Improvement

Category: Women's Health
Posted on: June 28, 2007 9:15 AM, by NotoriousLTP

Madam Fathom has a great piece on the results of fellow Sinai researcher John Morrison's study into cognitive improvement with estrogen treatment. (I would note, however, that hormone replacement therapy is still not recommended for anything other than the acute treatment of menopause because of negative cardiovascular side-effects associated with it.) (OVX = ovariectomized)

A new study by John Morrison at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine investigated this issue by OVXing old and young rhesus monkeys, and treating half of each group with estrogen. The group then tested the monkeys on a task of short-term memory (STM), a component of working memory, in which the monkeys had to remember the location of an object after an increasing delay. They found that aged OVX monkeys which had not received estrogen treatment performed significantly worse than any of the other three groups (aged OVX + estrogen, young OVX + estrogen, young OVX), indicative of significant cognitive decline. Moreover, the two groups of young animals performed equivalently, regardless of whether they received estrogen treatment, and the aged OVX + estrogen group performed equally well as the former two. This surprising finding indicates that the estrogen treatment in the aged monkeys was sufficient to improve their cognitive function to levels comparable to their younger peers.

Read the whole thing.

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