The Menopause-Alzheimer’s Connection and What You Can Do About It
With recommendations for improving brain health
Most medical research is predicated on the default male body creating an environment where women’s health care is substandard to that of men. Add into that mix, historical attitudes toward women’s health complaints as “hysterical”, and you have a recipe for dismissive health care for women. Maya Dusenberry’s breakthrough book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick describes both the knowledge gap and the trust gap when it comes to women and doctors.
And nowhere is that more obvious than in the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease in women and the lack of neuroscience research into the causes. Women develop Alzheimer’s at a rate of two to one compared to men. One would think that with that lopsided statistic, research dollars would be expedited to understand the sex differences in the development of Alzheimer’s on a national level. But it took a researcher from a clinic specializing in women’s medicine to make some important discoveries.
Neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi, Ph.D., Director of the Weill Cornell Women’s Brain Initiative, and author of last year’s book, “The XX Brain”, researches the connection between menopause and Alzheimer’s disease…
