(McClatchy-Tribune Information Services) -- Adding insult to injury, researchers have found that women who are just beginning menopause have a more difficult time learning new things than they did before.

Luckily, it's only temporary.

The study is published in the journal Neurology.

For four years, scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, studied more than 2,300 women between the ages of 42 and 52 who had had at least one menstrual period in the three months before the study began.

The participants were given a verbal memory test, a working memory test and a test that measured the speed at which they processed information.

Women were tested throughout the four stages of menopause: premenopausal (no change in menstrual periods); early perimenopausal (menstrual irregularity but no "gaps" of 3 months); late perimenopausal (having no period for three to 11 months); and postmenopausal (no period for 12 months).

The researchers found that processing speed increased with repeated testing during all stages except during late perimenopause.

For verbal memory performance, things again went downhill during late perimenopause -- and also during early perimenopause.

These two findings suggested to the researchers that women don't learn as well during early and late perimenopause as they do during other menopause transition stages.

"The good news is that the effect of perimenopause on learning seems to be temporary. Our study found that the amount of learning improved back to premenopausal levels during the postmenopausal stage," said Gail Greendale, a researcher at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

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