(What is perimenopause? Your brain may hold a clue.)
“Menopause is not just a hormonal process, it’s also brain-transition process. There are documented structural changes going on in the brain,” says Angélica Rodríguez, a graduate student at Puerto Rico’s Ponce Health Sciences University, who presented a review of this research at the annual conference of The Menopause Society in Orlando, Florida, last week.
A decade ago, women primarily mentioned hot flashes and night sweats at their appointments, but in recent years “we’ve started to hear more of these symptoms from patients,” Shaw says, noting this is likely fueled by the increased research as well as greater societal openness about the array of changes menopause brings.
Still, many questions remain, because menopause neuroscience remains underfunded, Pauline Maki, a longtime researcher on women’s cognition at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told clinicians at the conference.
Areas involved with memory are physically shrinking
Rodriguez’s review examined five major studies published between 2020 and 2024. One in the journal Scientific Reports involved several different types of brain imaging in more than 150 women. It found that the volume of the brain’s cortex—the area involved with memory, information processing, and other cognitive functions—as well as the white matter connecting the neurons do decline during perimenopause. Blood flow in the brain also diminishes.