16/08/2026
This is a question I get asked a lot in clinic and I see there is another study in the news again this week... I wonder Tanya Borowski Nutrition & Functional Medicine what your thoughts are on the latest research as this excellent post was from 2024.
Should I be taking hormone therapy to protect my brain & prevent Alzheimer's? A great question Lara Briden & I were asked at our event last week, & is a common headline in media too.
I want to share 3 important takeaways on cognition, brain health & hormone therapy I learnt at IMS congress, from Dr Pauline Maki PhD - a woman who knows this area intimately!
1ļøā£ Hormone Therapy š„ For the majority of women there is a normative decline in memory performance pre-perimenopause & in perimenopause. There is no evidence that hormone therapy helps to sustain memory performance when we look at 4x high quality randomized trials. All conclude HT doesnāt enhance memory at this stage
2ļøā£ Hot Flushesš„Maki did a study showing treating moderate to severe hot flushes memory bounces back. Importantly, she treated with a non-hormonal intervention, providing at the very least a āproof of conceptā that hot flushes were associated with memory problems & if you treated hot flushes (which doesn't have to be hormone therapy), memory improved in relation to the magnitude of improvement in the hot flushes as did alzheimer's biomarkers. So it stands to reason, treating hot flushes with HT or non hormonal can improve memory performance.
On this point, itās also important to note that no clinical trials have been done to assess if giving women with hot flushes HT improved memory performance because the trials excluded women experiencing them. Why? they wanted to ask the question - in asymptomatic women does giving HT improve memory? In this population the answer is no. And with hot flushes in this trial, the answer is we donāt know, because they were excluded.
3ļøā£ Sleep š¤ sleep deprivation increases the markers of Alzheimerās disease in the cerebral spinal fluid. Our brains accumulate these proteins during the day. At night, there is a metaphorical wave that mechanically clears these proteins from our brain. When asked what her favourite drug of choice was to aid sleep (yes this was asked!) her reply - which I love was: ānoneā - there is not a drug that resolves insomnia the most effective way to turn this around is retraining the brain. Which comes back to nervous system recalibration.
