Women’s brain health remains the most under-researched and underdiagnosed undertreated fields of medicine. It is a prevailing problem in the medical field. People are aware that women develop breast cancer but they are unaware that for one man, two women are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease. The threat of the disease is significant: Women in their sixties are about twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s over the rest of their lives as they are to develop breast cancer. In an interview with Dr Chatterjee, Neuroscientist, Lisa Moscone talked about some of the myths associated with Alzheimer’s — and why the differences between men and women’s brains matter.
Alzheimer’s written in wooden cubes on a table
Lisa describes her frustration at constantly being told by peers that the reason Alzheimer’s was more prevalent in women was simply because they live longer, and it’s a disease of ageing. She has done a ground-breaking research that has exposed this bias, finding dementia brain changes can actually begin in midlife, triggered by declining estrogen during perimenopause.
“There are the three Ps; puberty, pregnancy and peri-menopause. Puberty is common to both men and women and it’s really the beginning of our life as adults. So the brain from the moment of conception is growing at light speed, but once we hit puberty, we go through transitions which are called neuroendocrine transition states. It means our neurological system, our brain and the endocrine systems that get in transition together. Our bodies are maturing from a sexual perspective but so is our brain in ways that are above and beyond reproduction”, says Lisa in the interview.
Talking about the importance of hormonal changes she says, “Men have more androgens like testosterone while women have more estrogens like estradiol which is the most potent of estrogens. What’s important is that these hormones are not just key for reproduction and fertility, they are also incredibly important for brain function, they supercharge your brain.”
According to Lisa and if we think about it, commonly we just know how puberty starts and what it means for boys and girls when they go through puberty but we often don’t make the link that hormones that are changing in our body also have an impact on our brain. So they are hormones but those hormones actually changed the way your brain functions as well.
Alzheimer’s is a huge threat to women’s health, and nobody talks about it. Most women are not even aware of the problem. The media doesn’t report on it. Doctors aren’t trained to address it. From a health-care perspective, there are a few biases that deserve large-scale and immediate attention, because like all preconceptions, their consequences can be widespread and disastrous. The disease is generally understood as the inevitable outcome of unlucky genes, aging, or both which is not the case.
The truth is, while some people do indeed develop diseases like Alzheimer’s due to genetic mutations in their DNA, this typically happens to no more than 1 to 2 percent of the population. Recent population-based studies estimate that at a minimum, one-third of all Alzheimer’s cases could be prevented by attending to key medical and lifestyle shifts. These shifts include a different approach to diet and exercise, conscientious intellectual and social engagement, stress reduction, better sleep, balancing hormones, avoiding smoking and toxin exposure, and management of cardiovascular health, as well as those factors leading to obesity and diabetes, to name a few. These practices work in powerful harmony to keep dementia at bay.
Lisa also breaks the myth about ‘women living longer than men’ by building a correlation between increasing women employment and decreasing life expectancy as she says, “Women’s changing roles in society, unhealthy behaviors, stresses, and struggles that have come from and with that, have been silently affecting not only our hearts, hormones, and waistlines—but our brains, too. It is in fact our brains that have been suffering to the point of precipitating our chances of developing a neurological disorder like Alzheimer’s.”
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