Ever since, hormone therapy (HT) for women has been downright confusing. Doctors have been massively backpedaling on what they had told their women patients about hormone therapy. And both the doctors and the women caught in the middle have felt betrayed.The big question remains: whether or not to take hormones during or after menopause. Women want to know, Will the benefits outweigh the risks for me personally? Since the average woman in the WHI study was sixty-four years old and hadn’t been on any hormones for thirteen years after menopause, do the study results pertain to, say, a fifty-one-year-old woman now going through menopause and feeling miserable? Or a sixty-something woman who has been on and off hormone therapy? Women ask, Will my brain be able to adjust to no estrogen? Will my brain cells be unprotected if I don’t take hormone therapy?Since the WHI study was not designed to answer questions about hormone therapy and protection of the female brain, we must turn to other studies that have looked directly at the effects of estrogen on the brain.Estrogen’s effect on brain cells and function has been extensively studied in female laboratory rodents and primates.
