Comparison of the association between measures of estrogen exposure and dementia risk in spontaneously postmenopausal women

These results suggest that estrogen exposure plays a role in individual differences in dementia risk. However, the comparable concordance values across models limit the ability to further probe mechanistic explanations. Notably, although reproductive span is a commonly used index of lifetime estrogen exposure, it is inherently highly correlated with age of menopause given the larger variance in menopause age (here 15.66) compared with age of menarche (here 2.38). Future work employing more comprehensive measure of lifetime estrogen exposure are warranted to explore the mechanisms underlying the estrogen-AD connection.