2008 Age Plus Prize Winner

Catherine Lord
McMaster University
Hippocampal volumes are larger in postmenopausal women using estrogen therapy compared to past users, never users and men: a possible window of opportunity effect

Potential risks and benefits of using hormone therapy following menopause are still a matter of debate. Evidence exists suggesting that estrogen has a protective effect on the brain. Dr. Lord's article is one of the first to show that postmenopausal women using estrogen therapy have a larger volume of a memory related structure in the brain named the hippocampus as compared to non-users and men. It appears that the benefits of estrogen decline over time since it was observed that the longer the use of estrogen therapy, the smaller the hippocampal volumes.

Dr. Lord and her colleagues recruited 41 postmenopausal women and 15 men aged 50-74, and divided them into four groups: women using estrogen therapy, women who had previously used estrogen therapy, women who never used hormone therapy, and men. Magnetic resonance imaging was used in order to get images of the participants' brains. Using those images, researchers manually outlined the hippocampus to assess its volume, which was then compared between the four groups.

Results suggest that estrogen therapy following menopause has a treatment duration-dependent protective role on hippocampal volume in aging. That is, estrogen therapy seems to have beneficial effects on the aging brain following menopause but only for a certain amount of years. More studies are needed but these results might help understand normal and pathological brain aging and associated memory loss.

Dr. Lord is interested in the effect of sex and stress hormones on women's brains. These results paved the way for her future research by demonstrating the effect of estrogen exposure on brain structures in aging.

Currently in autumn 2008, Dr. Lord is doing a postdoctoral fellowship at McMaster University at the Women's Health Concerns Clinic. Her goal is to understand the impact of stress hormones on brain activity in postpartum women with anxiety symptoms. She would like to pursue a career studying the effects that stress, reproductive events and estrogen exposure have on brain function in women, with a particular focus on aging.