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Abstract:
Abstract: Recent evidence suggests that hormonal changes
accompanying menopause may partly account for memory-loss in aging
women and that these memory effects can be tempered by the use of
estrogen therapy. Postmenopausal estrogen-users and non-users
(60-80 yrs. old), as well as regularly cycling young women (18-30
yrs. old) completed a source memory task, in which they studied two
lists of sentences (List1 and List2 in sequence). Event-related
brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during the test phase, while
a series of pairs of sequentially-presented nouns (half seen during
study; half new) were presented. For words judged old, subjects
were asked to name the source of the word, i.e., list 1 or 2.
Behavioral results showed that young women and estrogen users
outperformed the non-users on measures of both item and source
memory. Differences between the groups were also revealed in the
timing of the ERP old-new effects. Young and estrogen-using women
showed shorter P3 latencies to correctly identified old words and
shorter N4 latencies to correctly identified new words than the
non-using women. These data suggest a positive effect of estrogen
use in postmenopausal women on behavioral and electrophysiological
measures of memory. Supported by: NIA (K01 - AG00879-01; R03 -
AG16396-01)
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