Forget it

There has been good news and bad news about hormone therapy for post­menopausal women. Now, there’s equivocal news.

A recent study led by a Stanford Medicine researcher and published online in July 2016 in Neurology has shown that hormone therapy has no appreciable effect on a woman’s cognitive skills, regardless of whether she begins treatment shortly after menopause or a decade-plus later.

“Our results suggest that healthy women at all stages after menopause should not take estrogen to improve memory,” says the study’s senior and lead author, Victor Henderson, MD, professor of health research and policy and of neurology and neurological sciences. “At the same time, they don’t need to be overly concerned about negative effects of estrogen on memory.”