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Thursday, November 07, 2002Zandi and his colleagues analyzed medication history and health status for 1,357 men and 1,889 women living in Cache County who were 65 or older. They found women who used hormone replacement therapy had a 41 percent reduction in their risk of getting Alzheimer's compared with HRT nonusers. Wow. That's impressive. But wait. Here's the real story: Of the women who didn't use HRT, 7.3 percent were diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Of those who used HRT, 2.4 percent got the disease, researchers reported, which was close to the men's Alzheimer's finding of 2.6 percent. Not so impressive anymore, is it? There were also some confounding variables among the study subjects that need to be taken into account. The most important being the age and educational status of the women who used hormone replacement therapy. They were, on average, three years younger than those who didn’t take it, and they were slightly more educated. Age plays a big role, probably the biggest, in developing dementia, so it’s no wonder that the older group of non-hormone therapy users had higher rates of Alzheimer’s. Also, for some reason, the better-educated the patient, the better they do on Alzheimer’s testing. They’re able to cover up/ and or compensate for their losses better than the less-educated. Estrogen isn’t yet ready to be a miracle brain food. If you’re interested, here’s a link to the raw data and here’s a link to the study. (available wholly intact for free without registration for a change.) posted by Sydney on 11/07/2002 08:14:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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