Results from a Canadian study recently published in Neurology have revealed that early menopause and a higher risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) could be linked to cognitive decline later in life.
Researchers compared the cognition of over 16,000 female and male participants from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging.
Dementia is a condition that impairs a person’s ability to remember, think or make decisions in day-to-day life. It affects an estimated 733,040 people in Canada, according to the Alzheimer’s Society of Canada.
Researchers divided 8,360 women into three groups: women who experienced earlier menopause between ages 35 and 48; average menopause between ages 49 and 52; and later menopause between ages 53 and 65, and identified those who had used hormone therapy containing oestrogens.
The team analysed the health information of all participants, including 8,360 men, which included cardiovascular risk factors such as high blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, obesity and smoking, and measured cognitive function via memory and thinking tests at the beginning of the study and three years later.
After examining the cardiovascular risk with cognitive scores in the three female groups and comparing them to male participants, results showed that females who experienced earlier menopause and higher cardiovascular risk had lower cognitive scores after three years, while no associations were found for female participants with average or later menopause or hormone therapy.
In addition, female participants with earlier menopause showed a decrease of 0.044 in cognitive scores compared to male participants in the same age group, who showed a 0.035 standard deviation decrease in cognitive scores.
“Our study suggests that earlier menopause may worsen the effects of high cardiovascular risk on cognitive decline” and “highlights that age at menopause… should be considered when developing prevention strategies for cognitive decline,” said the University of Toronto’s Jennifer Rabin, senior author of the study.
Commenting on the results, Dr Leah Mursaleen, head of clinical research, Alzheimer’s Research UK commented: “To unravel how this might be happening… it would be helpful to investigate this relationship in more diverse populations of women over a longer period of time to see how their cognition changes in later years.”