Study: Low estrogen level may affect Alzheimer’s disease

Women are more often affected by Alzheimer’s disease than men, and more than a third of those affected are women, which may have a biological explanation.

No one fully understands why more women than men get Alzheimer’s disease, but one part of the solution may be that women lose estrogen as they go through menopause, he wrote. CNN.

A new study may have found an explanation

However, it is also unclear how the loss of estrogen and the effect of estrogen therapy affects the risk of dementia.

But one New study Maybe they’ve found a puzzle piece or two. Accumulations of tau protein and plaques composed of amyloid proteins are hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease.

The study found that women who entered menopause early, between ages 40 and 45, and prematurely, before age 40, as well as women who started estrogen therapy five years after menopause had higher levels of tau in the brain.

Higher levels of tau and beta-amyloid

“This is the first study to show that late use of hormone therapy appears to be associated with increased levels of Alzheimer’s disease markers in the brain,” says the study’s lead author. Gillian Coghlan to CNN.

She is a neuroscience researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, adding that the changes only occurred in women who already had higher levels of beta-amyloid in their brains.

“Most of the associations we’ve seen between menopause and tau occurred in the context of high levels of amyloid. Now, a large portion of older adults accumulate amyloid as they age, which is not surprising.”

More common with tau accumulations

She adds that tau accumulations, however, are more unusual and that accumulations of tau and beta-amyloid are required for the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

She explained that a buildup of beta-amyloid and tau in the brain usually leads to cognitive impairment within a few years.

“What we found is that women who go through early menopause, or who use hormone therapy very late, may have a higher risk, but only if they are already in the Alzheimer’s cascade, with elevated levels of amyloid,” she told CNN.

She adds that women with very low levels of amyloid and early menopause had no such association.

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