A new study has found that the female hormone oestrogen may be linked to the high risk of developing dementia in women.
The study was published in the journal, ‘PLoS Medicine’, is led by the George Institute for Global Health.
Dementia is fast becoming a global epidemic, currently affecting an estimated 50 million people worldwide. This is projected to triple by 2050, mainly driven by the aging population. Rates of dementia and associated deaths are both known to be higher in women than men, according to the reports.
The study also found that “some reproductive events, like an early or late start to menstruation, early menopause, and hysterectomy, were linked to a higher risk of dementia while ever having been pregnant or having had an abortion and later menopause was linked to lower risk.”
But childbearing was not one of them, with a similar relationship observed between the number of children and dementia risk in men and women.
Lead author Ms. Jessica Gong from the George Institute for Global Health said that “although it appeared reproductive events related to changes in hormone levels in women may be involved in dementia risk, the exact relationship was still unknown.”
“While the risk of developing dementia increases with age, we don’t yet know whether the higher rates seen in women are simply because they live longer. But female-specific reproductive factors may be able to explain some of the sex differences,” Ms. Gong added.
To examine, George Institute researchers analyzed data on a total of 273,240 women without dementia who were registered with the UK Biobank, a large-scale biomedical database.
“With regard to external hormones, the use of oral contraceptive pills was associated with a lower risk of dementia, but our study findings did not support an association between HRT and dementia risk,” Ms. Gong said.
The authors proposed that risk variation in women may not be associated with childbearing because a similar pattern was observed between the number of children fathered and dementia risk among a similar number of men in the same study.
“We found that the higher dementia risk linked to early (natural and artificial) menopause was more pronounced in women of lower socioeconomic status. Social deprivation is likely to be an important determinant of dementia risk as well as other aspects of women’s health. More research is needed to understand whether these differences are associated with life-long exposure to the body’s own estrogen and whether external hormone use could influence the risk of developing dementia. Our findings may help identify high-risk women to participate in future clinical trials to assess potential preventive measures and treatments,” concluded Ms. Gong.
