Should women measure their hormone levels and if they drop, take hormone replacement therapy?

At this point, there’s no role for hormonal replacement in terms of dementia prevention. The initial study that came out from the Women’s Health Initiative back in 2003 showed that hormones are not good for us, but there were a lot of problems in that study. The women studied were older and they didn’t start the hormonal replacement until ten years after menopause or more. Since that time, we’ve been wondering if there’s a window where hormone replacement may be helpful and the studies so far have been inconclusive on that—if you started within a very narrow window of menopause and use it for a short time. There’s a lot of research going on in this area for women who are having trouble with hot flashes, menopausal symptoms and it’s interfering with sleep. Maybe that’s something that needs to be considered, but this decision needs to be made on a very individual basis with your physician.