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• Posted August 28, 2026

Hormone Therapy Might Lower Dementia Risk Among Women

Hormone therapy might reduce the risk of dementia in women after menopause, a new study says.

Women who received hormone therapy had a 16% lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, researchers reported Aug. 26 in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia.

The benefits were greatest for women who’d undergone menopause as a result of surgery — they had a 26% lower risk of developing any type of dementia, researchers said.

“We found that women who had used (hormone therapy) were about 10% less likely to develop dementia, and 16% less likely to develop the Alzheimer’s disease form of dementia, than women who had never used it,” senior researcher Anne-Marie Minihane said in a news release. She’s director of the Norwich Institute for Healthy Aging at the University of East Anglia in the U.K.

For the new study, researchers followed more than 180,000 postmenopausal women participating in UK Biobank, a long-range U.K. health research project, for an average of 13 years.

During that time, nearly 4,000 of the women developed dementia.

Results showed that using hormone therapy for at least one year lowered a woman’s risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s.

“We found that (hormone therapy) is especially beneficial for women who have gone through a surgical menopause, for example after having their ovaries removed,” Minihane said. “In this group, those who used (hormone therapy) were around 26% less likely to develop dementia than women who didn’t use it.”

Women whose bodies naturally produced less estrogen over their lives also seemed to get more help from hormone therapy, Minihane said. These women started their periods late or hit menopause early.

“Their risk of dementia was around 16 per cent lower with (hormone therapy),” Minihane said.

Hormone therapy also appeared to blunt the risk of Alzheimer’s among women carrying the APOE4 gene variant, which is known to raise the odds of Alzheimer’s.

Among those women, hormone therapy lowered their risk by about 13%, the study says.

“This is really important because APOE4 carriers are typically considered at higher risk and have fewer established prevention options,” Minihane said.

Timing of hormone therapy plays a role as well, researchers found.

Women who began hormone therapy between the ages of 46 and 56 experienced the greatest reduction in dementia risk, the study showed.

This supports the “critical window” hypothesis, which holds that hormone therapy can be more beneficial if started closer to menopause rather than later in life, researchers said.

“Our findings contribute to growing evidence that hormone therapy’s effects on brain health are complex and influenced by individual biological factors,” Minihane said.

“While (hormone therapy) has long been prescribed primarily to relieve menopausal symptoms such as hot flushes and night sweats, this work suggests it may also play a role in long‑term cognitive health for some women,” she concluded.

More information

The Menopause Society has more on hormone therapy.

SOURCES: University of East Anglia, news release, Aug. 26, 2026; Alzheimer’s & Dementia, Aug. 26, 2026