Dr. Jeffrey Gladden reviews a study of 500,000 women showing hormone replacement therapy was linked to roughly 50% lower dementia risk, despite huge variation in hormone type and duration. He explores how balanced hormones might protect the brain through tissue resilience and immune function, while noting the complexity of interpreting the findings.
They looked at 500,000 women, and they looked at women that got any form of hormone replacement. And by that, it could have been they got testosterone for a month, they got estrogen for two weeks, they got estrogen, progesterone, testosterone for six years. They got whatever, right? And what they showed was that there was a 50% reduction in in dementia in the group that got any form of hormone replacement therapy, which is I thought was fascinating because if you just got testosterone for 2 weeks, that's going to have any kind of impact, or you got estrogen for 3 months or whatever, right? Unopposed estrogen, which we know is potentially dangerous. So I think it's an interesting piece of it. But when you think about it, hormones, they basically create a lot more robustness in the tissues. They also are immune modulating in many respects when they're balanced, right? So the combination of immune modulation, tissue resilience and robustness, the many factors that go into play here, and then you bring in the pathogens and all this, you can see it's just this incredibly complex morass.
