Increased memory load-related frontal activation after estradiol treatment in postmenopausal women
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UMass Chan Affiliations
Department of Obstetrics and GynecologyDocument Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2010-11-21Keywords
Administration, OralAged
Estradiol
Estrogen Replacement Therapy
Female
Frontal Lobe
Humans
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Memory
Middle Aged
Placebos
Postmenopause
Task Performance and Analysis
Up-Regulation
Obstetrics and Gynecology
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Show full item recordAbstract
Prior research shows that menopause is associated with changes in cognition in some older women. However, how estrogen loss and subsequent estrogen treatment affects cognition and particularly the underlying brain processes responsible for any cognitive changes is less well understood. We examined the ability of estradiol to modulate the manipulation of information in working memory and related brain activation in postmenopausal women. Twenty healthy postmenopausal women (mean age (SD)=59.13 (5.5)) were randomly assigned to three months of 1mg oral 17-beta estradiol or placebo. At baseline and three months later each woman completed a visual verbal N-back sequential letter test of working memory during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The fMRI data showed that women who were treated with estradiol for three months had increased frontal activation during the more difficult working memory load conditions compared to women treated with placebo. Performance on the verbal working memory task showed no difference between estradiol and placebo treated subjects. These data are consistent with prior work showing increases in frontal activation on memory tasks after estrogen treatment. However, this is the first study to show that estrogen-induced increases in brain activity were tied to cognitive load during a verbal working memory task. These data suggest that estradiol treatment effects on cognition may be in part produced through modulation of frontal lobe functioning under difficult task conditions.Source
Horm Behav. 2010 Nov;58(5):929-35. Epub 2010 Sep 19. Link to article on publisher's siteDOI
10.1016/j.yhbeh.2010.09.003Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/42813PubMed ID
20849856Related Resources
Link to Article in PubMedae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1016/j.yhbeh.2010.09.003