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March 20th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda TUESDAY, March 20 (HealthDay News) — The memory blips and
distractible moments that women say they experience during menopause may
be as real as the hot flashes and poor sleep, a new study suggests.
Researchers gave women who said they were experiencing “menopause fog”
a series of cognitive tests to see how well their abilities matched their
complaints. Sure enough, the women who felt they had more memory problems
were also the ones who did not keep track of information or maintain their
focus as well.
“The main point of this study is that women are really good monitors.
If a woman says, ‘I’m having memory problems,’ she probably is,” said
study co-author Pauline Maki, director of Women’s Mental Health Research
in the department of psychiatry at University of Illinois at Chicago.
On the other hand, people with age-related mental decline do not
usually identify the problem, suggesting the memory issues in this study
are not just because the women are getting older, Maki added.
The study, published in March in the journal Menopause, could
help women and their doctors appreciate the reality of menopause fog. “I
think some attribute it to, for example, poor sleep because of hot
flashes, or poor mood, and that’s why it’s helpful to have these
analyses,” Maki said.
Previous research has found that about two-thirds of women going
through menopause describe memory problems.
The current study involved 75 women who rated their memory performance
based on factors like how often they forgot details and how serious their
forgetfulness was. Researchers also gathered information about the women’s
overall health, mood and hormone levels.
The women in the study were going through an early stage of menopause
called perimenopause, meaning they were having less frequent periods and
beginning to experience symptoms of menopause. The participants were
between 40 and 60 years of age.
Overall, 41 percent reported having forgetfulness that was serious. The
women who felt their mental shortcomings were more severe were more likely
to score poorly on tests of working memory and attention.
In day-to-day life, women with working memory problems would probably
have to reread a story several times to make sense of the details, Maki
explained. And if there were a noise in the background like a siren, women
with poor attention would struggle to stay focused on the story.
On the other hand, memory complaints were not associated with problems
with a longer-term type of memory, called verbal memory, which was put to
the test by asking women to recall lists of words. Nevertheless, some
women likely do experience verbal memory deficits at later stages of
menopause or as their menopausal symptoms become more severe, Maki
said.
Although the women who reported more severe memory deficits were also
more likely to experience problems such as depression and hot flashes, the
study found that these ailments could not entirely explain poor working
memory and attention.
This suggests that menopause fog is due not just to poor mood and
distractions like hot flashes and poor sleep, but to the direct effect of
changing levels of hormones like estrogen. Estrogen is thought to
influence parts of the brain involved in memory.
While the researchers did not find an association between level of
estrogen in the blood and memory ability, it is probably changes in
estrogen levels in the brain that are important, and these are next to
impossible to measure, Maki said.
In addition to changes related to menopause, a number of other
stressors in life, from work to taking care of children and parents, that
pile up around the same time as menopause can hinder memory and ability to
concentrate, said Nancy Woods, a professor at the University of Washington
School of Nursing.
While the study supports that women experience memory setbacks,
particularly in working memory and attention, there are some positive
messages to take from it, Woods said. It is helpful for women to know that
what they are going through is normal and that their memory problems are
not necessarily an early sign of dementia.
In fact, research indicates that after menopause, when hormone levels
stabilize, many women regain their cognitive ability, Maki said.
In the meantime, women may be able to improve their memory during
menopause by taking steps like repeating information back to themselves
and getting aerobic exercise.
More information
For more on menopause, got to the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
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