Women, Menopause and Alzheimer’s: XX Brain Connections with Lisa Mosconi, Ph.D.

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What are the simple lifestyle things that women of any age can do that are going to reduce Alzheimer's risk?

There are many. And I think that it's important to really focus on the research that looked at women in particular. So we have a lot of literature on lifestyle and lifestyle effects on our brains, and then there's actual research done in women separately from men. And what's interesting is that the factors that really matter are somewhat different between men and women. And that's helpful because you can't do everything at once, right? Otherwise they get overwhelmed and it's just too much and it's not sustainable. So I think what we all can do is to really take a good look at that lifestyle and choose a couple of things that you can do reliably and consistently over time that are known and scientifically proven to really matter for the health of your brain. As a woman and as a man, maybe you write the book about men. I got again, the women. For now, I think something that everybody's very interested in is diet, right? We all eat three times a day, if not more than that, unless fasting and perhaps.

Come on, three times a day. That's so 1990s.

Oh, my goodness. I'm sorry. But most people do.

Of course, of course. I'm just teasing.

So diet is really important in so many ways. We know that there's very direct connection between the nutrients that we choose to put into our bodies and the health of our brains for the short term and for the long term. And research in women's health has shown that some very specific nutrients are really important for women and for men as well. But the research really shows strong correlations between specific nutrients, especially antioxidants like vitamin C and vitamin E and women's brain energy levels. And what we know from the brain imaging studies, especially my studies, I guess at this point is that brain energy levels can drop during the transition to menopause. Can I show you?

I would love to see it. And as you're pulling that up, I run or own or founded or you want to call it a neuroscience clinic. Clinic's wrong word. A facility that does five day intense brain training with custom hardware and software, EEG based stuff. In fact, my lead neuroscientist is a former nuclear submarine engineer. We actually measure voltage changes in the brain and you really can pick up brain energy directly. So I don't know what you're going to show me, but I'm hoping it's eeg or is it Something else that's more like dye based. What do you got for us?

No, this is a technique. It's called positron emission tomography.

Ooh, pet.

Yes. And this is what I do. So my background, like you said, is in nuclear medicine. And what we do is that we use tracers that go in the brain and. And mimic a specific physiological reaction. Like in this case, we're looking at brain glucose metabolism in the brain. And this is a brain scan where very bright colors mean high brain energy levels.

So if you're watching on YouTube, you totally saw it. If you're listening, what you're seeing is a really nice, symmetrical brain with blue and yellow and red pictures on it or areas on it. And what do those indicate?

So this is really, this is the way you want your brain to look like when you're in your 40s as a woman. So really nice and bright. A lot more red than green. And this brain here belongs to a woman who was 43 years old when we scanned her the first time before menopause. And now let me show you her brain just eight years later after menopause.

All of the red, like the high energy areas in the prefrontal cortex, it looks like were.

Yeah, prefrontal, parietal, temporal, and posterior cingulate cortex. So all the regions that are usually affected by memory loss and Alzheimer's.

It's like looking at a different brain. The energy is sucked out of it.

Right. So it's the same shape. Pretty much. You can see it's the same. Anatomically speaking, it's the same brain. But that's a 30% drop in brain energy levels that really occur during menopause. And this is not an isolated finding. This is like what the average woman looks like, at least in our hands. So for some women, the changes are very mild, but for some women, they're more severe than this. And what's interesting is that this is really correlated strongly with the decline from premenopause to perimenopause. And then post menopause, there's. Your energy levels drop. And that's for the reason we were discussing that estrogen is an energizing hormone. So as estrogen declines, your brain reflects that, which I think is really important information to have because so many women can feel these changes and they really worry so much. Like so many of our patients have said to me that they're worried that they're going crazy or that they feel like their mind's playing tricks on them, to put it mildly. So it's so important. I think that we're doing the studies because we're really. We're validating what women have been saying for centuries, right? That something is happening that they need help overcoming or even better, that they need help preparing for, because this is avoidable. In many, many cases, this is avoid help overcoming or even better, that they need help preparing for, because this is avoidable. In many, many cases, this is avoid.