Dr. Betty MurrayHelping Women Navigate Menopause | Speaker, Author, and Advocate for Women's Health Over 40

Research on Women's Health Beyond the Optimal Window

8 Mar 2026 · 2 min

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1:39

In this segment, Dr. Betty Murray (PhD) outlines the comprehensive monitoring approach her team uses for women who are beyond the reproductive "optimal window" and are undergoing therapy. She explains that while she does not prescribe medication, her role is to provide data‑driven analysis to support prescribers. The protocol begins with individualized assessment of each patient, focusing on both adherence to the therapeutic regimen and measurable therapeutic effects. Key monitoring tools include baseline functional qEEG and brain scans performed under cognitive load to detect early cognitive changes, regular sleep‑quality tracking using wearable devices to observe improvements in deep and REM sleep during therapy, and bone‑health evaluation through DEXA scans complemented by trabecular bone score (TBS) to assess fracture risk. Dr. Murray emphasizes the importance of early detection, the evolving reliability of consumer wearables, and the integration of these metrics to guide treatment decisions for women outside the optimal reproductive period.

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So once you've made those decisions, right, you're looking at that. And again, these are the areas that I look at, particularly for women outside of that initial, like, optimal window. How do we monitor, right? So if therapy is initiated, I don't prescribe. I'm a PhD. I'm the nerd behind the prescribers, right? Our team always does all that analysis and then looks at women individually. So, and then we start to look at what are we monitoring for protocol adherence and also therapeutic effect, right? So we often do, like in our clinic, it's harder to do this online, but in our clinic, we do baseline functional qEEG and brain scan analysis under cognitive load. So we can actually see how are women doing cognitively at any time of life, but especially if we're trying to identify this, right, sooner rather than later, because usually by the time it starts to show up under cognitive load, we have a bigger, bigger road to hoe, right? We got a bigger thing that we got to do. So we do regular sleep quality analysis. Well, while somebody is initiating therapy, is their sleep improving? Do they feel better when they wake up? If they're wearing wearables, what's happening? Are they starting to see longer deep sleep, better REM sleep? These things aren't perfect, but they're imperfect and consistently imperfect, so they can at least give us an idea. So if your deep sleep says it's 6 minutes, It definitely ain't an hour and a half, right? They're not as good as a, as a real sleep study, but these devices are getting better and better, and they can at least help us understand your own data. We want to look at DEXAs and a TBS score on a DEXA, which is trabecular bone score, which can give you a fracture risk profile.