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ELITE: Lower postmenopausal estrogen levels unrelated to cognition, mood
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Lower estrogen levels after menopause are not associated with changes in cognitive ability and mood. However, there may be an association between levels of progesterone and cognition among younger postmenopausal women, according to new data from the ongoing ELITE study.
“Some effects might be more beneficial for younger postmenopausal women closer to the time of menopause than for older postmenopausal women,” Victor Henderson, MD, professor of health research and policy and of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, said in a press release.
In the Early vs. Late Intervention Trial with Estradiol (ELITE), researchers examined 643 healthy postmenopausal women aged 41 to 84 years who were not using hormone therapy and categorized them into two groups: those who transitioned into menopause in less than 6 years, and those who transitioned into menopause 10 or more years previously.
“We viewed the availability of hormone levels as opportunity to test one aspect of the critical-window hypothesis — especially since we had two fairly large samples of women,” Henderson said.
The primary hypothesis was that the association of estradiol levels with verbal episodic memory would differ between postmenopausal strata, with higher concentrations associated with better memory performance in the early group, but not in the late group, according to researchers.
“Instead, we found no significant link — positive or negative — in either group,” Henderson said.
The findings do not “necessarily mean that estrogens are irrelevant to cognition, since we have no way of measuring estrogen directly at the brain level. But they imply that boosting blood levels of estradiol or estrone — even in younger postmenopausal women — may not have a substantial effect on cognitive skills one way or the other,” he said.
However, researchers reported that for progesterone, there was a trend for a difference between postmenopausal groups. In particular, the progesterone levels were significantly and positively associated with both verbal memory and global cognition in the early menopause group.
The concentration of sex hormone-binding globulin was significantly and positively associated with verbal memory performance. The effects were similar in each menopause group, researchers said.
“This finding has not been previously reported and needs to be confirmed,” Henderson said.
In the future, data from ELITE should determine whether cognitive effects of exogenous estradiol exposure are modified by time from menopause, researchers wrote.
Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.
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