Women taking hormone replacement therapy may get an unexpected brain boost, according to new research presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, DC. For the study, researchers gave healthy post-menopausal women either a standard daily dose of estrogen or a placebo. After three months, they found that the hormone treatment increased the volume of grey matter in the brain’s cortex, an area that controls attention, decision-making and memory. This short-term therapy may be enough to prevent the mental lapses that often occur immediately post-menopause, when the brain must work harder to focus on simple memory tasks, say researchers. If you’re interested in staving off mental decline, talk to your doctor about whether hormone replacement therapy is right for you.

Read: The Wall Street Journal

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