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Mental Abilities: Of Menopause and Memory
By John O’Neil The
New York Times, September 23, 2003 Several years ago, Dr. Peter M. Meyer and his colleagues asked a large group of menopausal women how many of them were bothered by forgetfulness. "Every hand in the room went up," he recalled. But tests conducted over several years turned up no evidence to support the idea that menopause actually interfered with memory, according to an article released yesterday. The study, which was published in the journal Neurology, involved 803 women who had not yet reached menopause or were in early stages when the research began. Once a year, the women were tested on their ability to repeat long strings of numbers backward and to identify pairs of symbols and digits quickly. Dr. Meyer and his colleagues at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago expected to find the scores dropping. Instead, the scores rose slightly for all of the women in the group, menopausal or not. Dr. Meyer offered two explanations. He cited a study that used brain scanners to show that estrogen taken by menopausal women increased activity in the part of the brain devoted to verbal memory. The women's test scores were not higher, but changes in the pattern of activation could explain why they felt as if their memories were less efficient. Another explanation is that menopause often coincides with other circumstances that bring on stress, like children reaching adolescence and parents reaching old age. Since stress can lead to minor lapses in memory, women going through menopause may "have a hard time determining whether it is a result of the transition or whether it is related to role stress," Dr. Meyer said. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
