This book brings together some of the results and ideas produced by a large number of people-colleagues and students with whom I am privileged to work in the laboratory at Rockefeller University. In terms of my personal history I see it as a confluence of creative forces persons from whom I have learned. I was instructed in neuroanatomy by Walle J. H. Nauta at M. I. T. , and later in a course at Harvard Medical School under the direction of Richard Sidman. At Harvard Medical School, where M. I. T. graduate students were allowed to cross register, the superb neurophysiology course was under the guiding spirit of Stephen Kuffler. Later, I benefited greatly from participating in his summer course in electrophysiological techniques at Woods Hole. Eric Kandel and his colleagues have provided us with the most exciting contemporary approach to the conceptualization and study of cellular mechanisms for behavior. Here at Rockefeller, Carl Pfaffmann and Neal Miller have been leaders in every sense of the word. Not only did they provide me with opportunities to grow to scientific maturity; they also set an example of clear thinking about mechanisms for mammalian behavior patterns. I wrote this book to show how the systematic use of increasingly detailed electrophysiological, neuroanatomical, and neuroendocrine tech niques can explain the mechanism for a mammalian behavioral response. The behavior in question happens to be sensitive to steroid hormones and plays a central role in reproduction.

D., University of Southern California--Julie A. Dumas "Sex Roles"

"A book about the influence of estrogens on memory would have been unthinkable as recently as 30 years ago. Although a few small studies in the late 1970's reported a beneficial effect of estrogens on memory in human women (Hackman and Galbraith, 1976; Fedor-Freybergh, 1977), examination of the role of estrogens in memory did not truly capture more widespread attention until the pioneering work of Barbara Sherwin and colleagues in 1988 and beyond. In her initial paper, Sherwin showed that bilateral removal of the ovaries (aka surgical menopause) led to impaired short-term and long-term memory, whereas treatment of surgically menopausal women with estradiol alone, testosterone alone, or estradiol plus testosterone prevented this decline (Sherwin, 1988). As a search for the terms "estrogen" and "memory" in PubMed illustrates, well over 2000 papers have been published on the subject of estrogens and memory in the ensuing decades. The vast majority of these studies have focused on the hippocampus, a bilateral medial temporal lobe structure essential for the formation of episodic memories, particularly those with spatial, contextual, relational, temporal, and recognition components (Olton et al., 1979; Morris et al., 1982; Kim and Fanselow, 1992; Squire, 1992; Cohen and Stackman, 2015; Tonegawa et al., 2015; Eichenbaum, 2017). Although various forms of learning and memory are mediated by numerous brain regions, including the prefrontal cortex, medial temporal lobe cortices, amygdala, striatum, and cerebellum, the hippocampus has received the lion's share of attention due to its central importance for episodic memory formation. Hippocampal damage produces profound retrograde amnesia for facts and events, as well as anterograde amnesia for new information and impairments in spatial navigation (Winocur, 1990; Anagnostaras et al., 2001; Clark et al., 2002; Gilboa et al., 2006). Hippocampal dysfunction in middle-aged and aged subjects is a primary contributor to age-related memory decline (Golumb et al., 1996; Grady et al., 2003; Apostolova et al., 2010; Burke and Barnes, 2010; Small et al., 2011; Yassa et al., 2011), and has also been implicated in the cognitive impairments observed in diseases such as schizophrenia and depression (Small et al., 2011; Nakahara et al., 2018; Santos et al., 2018; Ott et al., 2019). Moreover, the hippocampi of patients with Alzheimer's disease are substantially atrophied and burdened with copious amounts of amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, the hallmark pathologies of this insidious disease (Hyman et al., 1984; Walsh and Selkoe, 2004; Selkoe and Hardy, 2016). As such, understanding how estrogens influence hippocampal functioning may provide important insights not only about the fundamental neurobiology of memory processes, but also into the etiology of neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases"--

Basic and clinical research on sex steroids, ageing, and cognition to integrate existing findings with emerging data.

This book concerns how estrogens are synthesized in the brain and their two modes of action on behavior: a slow process involving gene transcription and a faster action at the cell membrane. The significance of the regulation and distribution of the estrogen synthesizing enzyme aromatase in the brain is also highlighted.

This report reviews current research on the menopause, including studies on its symptons and their treatment, and its effects on the cardiovascular and skeletal systems. It also assesses the relevance of existing data to women in developing countries.