![]() ![]() There are dementia studies involving estrogen. There are depression studies involving estrogen. There are new hormone trials under way that are aimed at the 40-year-old to 60-year-old cohort, with first results due in 20. One after another, their notes and empty coffee cups piling up around them, heart experts and brain experts and mood experts got up to talk about estrogen - experiments, clashing data, suppositions, mysteries. They’re probing, interrogating, poking holes in one another’s work in progress.īut I was finally permitted to take a chair in a corner, and as the day went on, I became aware of my patch, in a distracted, hallucinatory sort of way, as if I had started fixating on a smallish scar. When I asked to listen in, the organizers hesitated these are colleagues around a conference table, they pointed out. The meeting was called Window of Opportunity of Estrogen Therapy for Neuroprotection, and it drew research scientists and physicians from all over the country. I first met Brinton at a scientific symposium at Stanford University in January that was entirely devoted to the timing hypothesis. Because the timing hypothesis adds another layer of complication to the current conventional wisdom on hormone replacement, it has implications for heart disease, bone disease and the way all of us women now under 60 or so - the whole junior half of the baby boomers, that is, and all our younger sisters - could end up re-examining, again, everything the last decade was supposed to have taught us about the wisdom of taking hormones. It has a working nickname: “the timing hypothesis.” Alzheimer’s is only one part of it. This proposition, that estrogen’s effects on our minds and our bodies may depend heavily upon when we first start taking it, is a controversial and very big idea. Their sputtering, fading Alzheimer’s brains, which a few decades earlier were maybe healthy brains that might have been protected from eventual damage if those women had taken estrogen, and taken it before they were long past their menopause, while their own neural matter still looked as vigorous as those rat cells on the wall. Do we just say, ‘Who cares?’ and move them into a nursing home? Or alternatively, maybe they are telling us something.” Let’s say it’s just because these ladies get old. Is it just because they live longer? Let’s say it is, for purposes of discussion. “Sixty-eight percent of all victims of Alzheimer’s are women. Something about the shooting mitochondria has made us reverent. “You want a statistic?” Brinton asked softly. The problem with the estrogen question in the year 2010 is that you set out one day to ask it in what sounds like a straightforward way - Yes or no? Do I or do I not go on sticking these patches on my back? Is hormone replacement as dangerous in the long term as people say it is? - and before long, warring medical articles are piling up, researchers are raising their voices and gesticulating excitedly and eventually you’re in Los Angeles staring at a fluorescent rodent brain in the dark. A., do you remember me?’ And she was so lovely. “We’d spend hours, me listening to her stories, and I’d walk out of the room,” Brinton told me. was a distinguished psychotherapist and had vivid stories she could still call to mind about her years in Vienna amid the great European psychologists. But during the closing years of her life she had Alzheimer’s, and Brinton would visit her in the hospital. Brinton uses estrogen and spends her work hours experimenting with it because of her own brain and also that of a woman whose name, Brinton will say, was Dr. I use estrogen, by means of a small oval patch that adheres to my skin, because of something that began happening to me nine years ago - to my brain, as a matter of fact. We’re inside a darkened lab room in a research facility at the University of Southern California, where Brinton works. At present it is mine too, but for more selfish reasons. Estrogen, particularly in its relationship to the health of the brain, is her obsession. I love shooting mitochondria.”īrinton is a brain scientist. ![]() ![]() They’re winking and zooming, like shooting stars. Mitochondria are cellular energy generators of unfathomably tiny size, but these are vivid and big because they were hit with dye in a petri dish and enlarged for projection purposes. Here we are, two fast-talking women on estrogen, staring at a wall of live mitochondria from the brain of a rat. ![]()
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