The Surprising Good News on How Menopause Changes Your Brain - The Wall Street Journal

Menopause changes women’s brains—but many of the changes are temporary, and the brain eventually compensates for some of them, according to new research.

In one of the first studies to take an in-depth look at brain changes in healthy women before and after menopause, researchers from Weill Cornell and the University of Arizona found that the menopause transition changes the brain’s structure, energy consumption and connectivity.

Brain regions associated with memory and perception also showed declining glucose levels, the study found.

“Our study suggests that the brain has the ability to find a new normal after menopause in most women,” said Lisa Mosconi, lead author of the study and an associate professor of neurology and director of the Women’s Brain Initiative at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.

Women in the study who had a genetic variant associated with a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease accumulated more plaques of a protein called amyloid beta during perimenopause than women and men without the genetic variant.