Study on sex hormone and serum lipid profiles in postmenopausal women with cerebral infarction

Objective To study the level changes of serum sex hormone and its effect on blood lipid in postmenopausal women with atherothrombotic cerebral infarction (ATCI). Methods Forty three post-menopausal (1 year) wemen with ATCI (group A, average 65.5 years old), 41 postmenopausal ( 1 year) healthy wemen (group B, average 63 years old) and 47 young healthy premenopausal wemen (group C, average 38 years old) as controls were enrolled to determine serum estradiol (E2), follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), luteinizing hormone (LH), total cholesterol (TC), high density lipoproteincholesterol (HDL-C), and low density lipoproteincholesterol (LDL-C) levels. Results Analysis of variance revealed that serum levels of FSH, LH, LDL-C were significantly higher while E2 and HDL-C were lowering in group A than those in group B and group C (all P0.01). Correlation analysis showed that serum E2 level was negatively correlated with serum FSH, LH, TC and LDL-C levels, but positively correlated with HDL-C. Conclusion It demonstrates there are significant disturbances of sex hormone and abnormal metabolism of lipid in the patients with postmenopausal ATCI. It is demonstrated in these biochemical changes, the lowering of serum E2 may be one of the pathogenic factors in ATCI.