10/06/2021
HOT OFF THE PRESS.! Excited to share our new paper in Scientific Reports providing deep studies on how menopause impacts the brain!
We associate menopause with the ovaries but in reality, our brain is as impacted as our ovaries are. In fact, 80% of women experience *brain* symptoms during menopause, including hot flashes, insomnia, depression, brain fog, and forgetfulness. Those symptoms start not in the ovaries but in the brain.
To be clear: Women are half of the population. All women go through menopause. All women have brains. Yet, while there’s a gazillion studies about menopause and the ovaries, we know close to nothing about how menopause impacts the brain.
Our new study is the first to fully map out the brain effects of menopause. We did a ton of brain scans showing that the transition to menopause involves myriad changes to brain structure, brain-region connectivity, and brain energy consumption. When we started looking into this, we were anticipated negative changes -- but what we discovered is a much bigger and more encouraging story!
For example, during menopause, women’s brains undergo declines in glucose metabolism (a source of energy). However, the brain seems to compensate for these declines by increasing blood flow and ATP production (the energy currency of all cells)! Also, while gray matter is reduced during menopause, in many brain regions, these declines are transient, even reversing by the time menopause is complete or in the years afterward. Importantly, women exhibiting this brain “recovery” also show preservation of memory and cognitive performance!
Overall, menopause reshapes the landscape of the female brain—and for most women, this reshaping includes adaptations that seem to maintain brain function despite the drop in estrogens. I’ll discuss links to Alzheimer’s later, but the headline is that the female brain has the remarkable, understudied, and under-celebrated ability to adapt to menopause. We hope our findings will encourage all women to look after their beautiful brains during menopause and beyond!
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