[imdavidson]

Hopeful, this is very interesting. Several studies have looked at how estrogen protects brain cells. Even in the womb, estrogen is vital to developing a healthy brain.

So if estrogen is good for the brain, the question is, what happens when people go on anti-hormonal drugs that deplete their bodies of estrogen. This is a topic of study as well for my co-author (Dr. Silverman at UCLA). He was one of the first researchers to use brain imaging to study how chemotherapy with and without tamoxifen affected memory. He found that breast cancer survivors who had been on both chemo plus tamoxifen were more impaired in certain areas than others who had been on chemo alone.

It makes sense that the aromatase-inhibitor group in this study you posted would perform worse on cognitive tests than the tamoxifen group (specifically looking at attention) because AIs tend to be more potent than tamoxifen in blocking estrogen (tamoxifen works by blocking the uptake of estrogen into cancer cells but AIs stop the body from producing estrogen in the first place).

Thanks so much for the link. I've printed out this study and will save it.