Estrogen and the Aging Primate Brain

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Progress on this trans-institutional collaborative effort in recent years has focused on continued quantitative morphometric analysis in the brains of behaviorally characterized subjects in relation to estrogen status. In a recent study, for example, Crimins et. al. (2017) used quantitative serial section immunoelectron microscopy to test the effects of estradiol administration on the representation of G protein-coupled estrogen receptor 1 (GPER1) in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of ovariectomized young and aged monkeys. GPER1 was distributed across a wide range of cellular components, but generally failed to differ as a function of age, hormone treatment, or cognitive status. Nonetheless, GPER1 representation specifically at the synapse was closely associated with synaptic density, suggesting that GPER1 is positioned to mediate a powerful influence of estrogen on synaptic plasticity. Future studies are expected to yield additional insight into the neurobiological implications of menopause and hormone treatment on womens cognitive health in aging.