The Menopause Brain: What feels like impairment may actually be improvement
Talking with Midi's Chief Health Officer Dr. Kathleen Jordan about estrogen, the brain, and preventative screenings to empower greater understanding and choice
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Fellow Empresses, How the hell are you? Worried AF? Well, I don’t blame you.
The Empress has given a great deal of thought to our brain health as we age—and yes… it’s been a particularly salient topic this past week, given what it means for the current U.S. Presidential race.
For our part, we’ve sought to understand the shift in estrogen levels in women’s brains and nervous systems as they transition through perimenopause to menopause and how it impacts symptoms such as brain fog, which is super common—74 percent of patients report this symptom—leaving many women to question whether it’s psychological (Am I imagining this?), neurological (Is this physiological?), and/or is it possibly something more serious, like early onset dementia, that needs specific intervention right now? Admittedly, there are certain days when I could put myself in any one of the three camps, depending on a variety of factors—sleep, stress, hydration, whether I got in a walk or yoga that day, etc.
However, I recently had the chance to speak with the Chief Medical Officer of a leading virtual care clinic, Midi, Dr. Kathleen Jordan, MD, about their efforts around preventative cognitive screening during peri/menopause for diagnosing brain fog versus more serious cognitive impairment.
Kathleen is someone I adored on sight because she is a Jodie-Foster-style medical research badass. :) Of course, in my GenX tendency toward Tracy-Flick levels of overpreparedness, and having just read Dr. Lisa Mosconi’s book The Menopause Brain… I had twenty million questions that I launched at her like a table full of cupcakes.
At one point in our conversation over Zoom, things got quite hilarious.
You know when there’s a slight slippage between two people talking to each other from two very different vantage points without the other realizing it? It’s almost like a Who’s on first? sketch. It was as if Kathleen kept trying to reassure me that menopause wasn’t causing me to lose IQ points and it was most likely due to hormones. And I kept looking around going, wait a sec, are you talking to me?
I can only imagine she must encounter countless concerned patients in her practice. But at one point, I may have even glanced over my shoulder at these invisible IQ points, fluttering off like butterflies, laughed out loud, and said, “Oh, I don’t think menopause is making me stupid, love… I think it’s making me amazing. My mind is more focused, lean, discerning, and skilled at making connections across disparate sets of knowledge than it has ever been.”
And then as an inveterate oversharer, I explained my whole odyssey with HRT over the past 14 years, my perimenopausal seizure disorder, and how I found HRT and menopause to be one of the better life transitions. For the first time in my life, since the age of twelve, my moods, brain, and body weren’t completely at war with wildly fluctuating hormones. And while I might stumble on a name occasionally, it wasn’t something I was overly worried about (though the first draft of this newsletter was chocked full of typos, lol.)
That said, for many women with family histories of dementia or general concerns, it is—and they want peace of mind so that they’re on top of any potential cognitive decline. What’s interesting is that 50% of people find out they’re suffering from cognitive impairment later than they should—when they could have intervened with proactive treatments much earlier. That’s why Midi has partnered with Dr. Lisa Mosconi’s company Neurotrack to provide women in peri/menopause with a new, easy, 3-minute online screening tool they can use to see if they have menopause brain fog or need further testing for more serious cognitive impairment, such as early onset dementia.
In the meantime, we clearly have some things to figure out as a nation in the next few months, but regardless of how you align politically, your family and loved ones are going to want you to have access to state-of-the-art brain healthcare for midlife and beyond, so get screened today and know that there is so much in midlife that can be done to feel and live better.
Stay safe out there.
Yours in Grandeur & Deep Sh*t,
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Loved your description of your new “cross platform” brain skills, I deeply relate. It makes sense given Dr Mosconi’s research, which shows that as women’s brains age they will close off pathways that are no longer needed (ex: rearing young kids) because it would be too neurologically expensive to keep using them, but the next thing is that our brains will become stronger in our strengths. The potential for “renovation” that she talks about is so exciting, and now I’m always looking for new things to learn and new challenges to take on, so I can do a full reno!
Thank you for this info!!! Heading over to that screening tool to check my brain now… wait, what was it called? 😂