Hormone replacement might boost your mood without dulling memory. Women going through menopause experience a whole host of unpleasant symptoms, but many worry if the fix might be worse than the illness. New research out this week has found that taking hormone replacement might actually elevate mood without dulling memory the way some had feared. “After tracking 662 participants for an average of nearly three years, the trial found that women enrolled in the trial around age 50 didn’t perform worse on tests of short- and long-term memory, verbal fluency and reasoning skills regardless of whether they were on oral estrogens-plus-progesterone or an estradiol patch-plus-progesterones. Over time, however, women who were assigned to get oral estrogens and progesterone reported moods that were less anxious, tense, depressed and dejected than those reported by women who were on placebo medications or who received the estradiol patch-plus-progesterone. The study’s findings are in keeping with growing evidence that, for women who take hormone replacements close to the time of their last period, and who stay on it for just a few years rather than decades, easing the symptoms of menopause may not be so dangerous.”