Table 2.
Key points: hormone therapy, dementia, and cognition
| • Estrogen-plus-progestin therapy initiated at age 65 or older increases dementia riska. |
| • Observational evidence, based largely on short-term use by younger women close to the time of menopause, associates hormone therapy with lower risk of Alzheimer's disease risk. |
| • If increased risk from WHIMS is extrapolated to postmenopausal women aged 50 to 59 years, the absolute risk of dementia from standard dose hormone therapy would be rare, representing about one additional case among 1000 women using hormone therapy for five years. |
| • For healthy young and old postmenopausal women, standard dose CEE/MPA therapy has a small, but significant adverse impact on verbal memory.a |
| • For healthy older healthy postmenopausal women, standard dose estrogen therapy does not have a clinically important effect on cognition.a |
a
High quality of evidence based on consistent findings from well-performed randomized trials.
Evidence for other key points is of lower quality.