So maybe that headline needs a bit of clarification: This new research has to do with postmenopausal women and their levels of estrogen. (Still, if you're a pre-menopausal woman, you should read this, too. Men, if you know any women, please read on.)
After a woman goes through menopause, her estrogen levels drop. This study, led by a Stanford School of Medicine researcher, was the first to look at associations between estrogen decline and cognition — both in women who went through menopause more recently (less than 6 years) and longer ago (more than 10 years). The research team wanted to know if the time from menopause made a difference in cognitive ability. And so we return to the headline: They found no connection.
"There were no differences between women close to the time of menopause and further from the time of menopause," said Stanford neurologist Victor Henderson, lead author of the study. The women were given a battery of neurological tests, not just "a short screening instrument," the authors wrote.
Primarily, the researchers looked at memory. "But we also looked at global cognition and executive function," Henderson said. "And based on relation to blood levels [of estrogen], we didn't find any important effects one way or the other."
Together with colleagues at the University of Southern California, Henderson looked at 643 women, none of whom have taken hormone replacement. While researchers did not find any connections between estrogen levels and cognition, they did uncover a surprising association between a different sex hormone, progesterone, and memory. In younger women, higher progesterone levels were associated with better memory.