MONDAY, Sept. 22, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- When women going through the "change of life" experience a lapse in memory, they often chalk it up to a "menopausal moment."
But in a new study of women moving through menopause, researchers have found that, overall, their working memory and perceptual speed actually improve with age. The study appears in the Sept. 23 issue of Neurology.
Debate about whether menopause, and the associated lower estrogen levels, leads to memory problems has been ongoing and "studies have been mixed," says study author Peter Meyer, an assistant professor of preventive medicine at Rush University in Chicago.
He and his colleagues tested 803 women, aged 42 to 52, annually over six years. The women were part of the large Study of Women's Health Across the Nation (SWAN), sponsored by the National Institute on Aging, to record the natural history of the menopausal transition.
The subset studied by Meyer and his team were tested annually on their working memory and perceptual speed. They also answered questions about their health, menopausal status, ethnicity and educational attainments.
The test of working memory involved repeating backwards as many increasingly long strings of digits as possible without error. In the perceptual speed test, women were shown a series of symbols and a number that corresponded to each symbol. Then, they were asked to identify as many symbol-number matches as they could in 90 seconds.
Meyer found perceptual speed and working memory improved slightly over time for women in pre-menopausal and early perimenopausal stages. Only for the perceptual speed tests was there a decrease in scores, and that was for postmenopausal women.
Working memory scores for postmenopausal women did not change greatly over time, he reports.
"Ours is the first [study] to follow women with annual interviews as they go through the menopausal transition," he says.
While the results are surprising, and the opposite of what Meyer's team hypothesized, he says he doesn't mean to say women don't have problems with forgetfulness as they age.
Middle-aged women often say they have trouble remembering someone's name or coming up with the proper word, Meyer says. Why? "Verbal processing skills might be different but not worse" with age, he says, somehow accounting for the forgetfulness. He hopes to find out more about that in future research.
Meyer also says that one explanation for the improvement on the perceptual speed and working memory tests might simply be a learning effect -- the women got better at the tests with practice.
"I'm not surprised," says Dr. Gary W. Small, director of the Aging and Memory Research Center and Memory Clinic at University of California, Los Angeles' David Geffen School of Medicine.
At the clinic and in his book, The Memory Bible, Small proposes a number of strategies so people of any age can improve their memories. "Mental activity is important to keep the brain healthy and young," he says.
Another expert, Dr. Sam Gandy, calls the findings reassuring for women in the short term, but says the study "doesn't really address at all what the long-term risk of Alzheimer's disease would be" with age. To assess that, the women would have to be followed 10 or 15 more years, he says, because age 65 is the typical age at which Alzheimer's is diagnosed. Gandy is vice chairman of the National Medical and Scientific Advisory Council of the Alzheimer's Association.
More information
For tips on talking with your doctor about memory problems and other issues, try the National Institute on Aging, which also has a page on how mental activity can ward off Alzheimer's.
