Menopause Symptoms and Memory Loss Despite of the fact that you can go through mood shifts and hot flashes when entering menopause, the only thing you shouldn't connect with it is memory loss. In the most recent research which justifies menopause as a reason of decreasing the ability to remember, Taiwanese experts made comparison of hundreds of female patients' memory before menopause signs with their ability to recall when the condition started. They discovered the female patients who were overcoming menopause scoring as fine or somewhat fine on five various cognitive functionality tests. Research's results will be announced October, 4 at the annual gathering of American Neurological Association in Toronto. "When women enter menopause, they have no need to worry bout inability to recall properly", claimed Doctor Jong-Ling Fuh, an attending therapeutic at Taipei Veterans General Hospital and a joint professor of School of Medicine in Yang-Ming University. According to experts' words, an erroneous idea of memory loss in course of menopause is a sensation some females possess because when they were overcoming menopause, they had a feeling of their memory being not so sharp as it had been. Researches offering hormone replacement technology for preventing amentia made this perception stronger. But actually, a wide research later revealed that in elder women, the therapy of hormone replacement not only did not assist in preventing amentia, but could really make the risk stronger. Trying to give an answer for the question of whether menopause possessed any effect on ability to recall, Fuh and her co-workers researches about 700 women in pre-menopause phase, who were residents of island group between China and Taiwan. The government of Taiwan forbade access to this place before 1990s, and the researches claim that the patients stock for the research was kind of homogeneous, this fact could assist in learning other possibly reasonable memory loss factors. The testees were all of the age range 40 to 54. None of women had overcome hysterectomy, and none of them passed hormone replacement technology in course of the research. All of them passed five cognitive function tests worked out to estimate their ability to recall and their cognition skills at the beginning of the research, and 18 months afterwards. In course of the research, 23 per cent of testees began acquiring signs of menopause. The experts then made a comparison of the testees who had already entered menopause with those who had not yet, and discovered insignificant difference. For four or five tests, they found no practically important differences between the two groups of testees. Only for one of the tests the difference was practically important, but that difference, according to Fuh, was quite narrow. The mentioned test was worked out to estimate verbal ability to remember and included showing 70 objects to women. Some of their number were iterated in course of the test, but the majority wasn't. The women were questioned if they had noticed the figure before. SOURCES: Jong-Ling Fuh, M.D., attending physician, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, and associate professor, Yang-Ming University School of Medicine, Taipei, Taiwan; Steven Goldstein, M.D., obstetrician/gynecologist, New York University Medical Center, and professor, obstetrics/gynecology, New York University School of Medicine, New York City; Raina Ernstoff, M.D., attending neurologist, William Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak, Mich., and member, Alzheimer's Board of Detroit; Oct. 4, 2004, presentation, American Neurological Association, Toronto.