The team’s goal is to develop a blood test that can act as an early-warning sign of dementia risk — the same way cholesterol tests are used to gauge heart disease risk. This could let clinicians identify people who, in midlife, might benefit from early interventions.
“Midlife is a critical window for both men and women where we can really set up the brain to be more resilient or more vulnerable to dementia in later life,” said study senior author Kaitlin Casaletto. “For women, menopause may be this especially powerful time to intervene.”
“The findings do not mean that menopause causes Alzheimer’s disease,” Casaletto is careful to point out. Most women do not develop Alzheimer’s, she said, and the clinical significance of individual Alzheimer’s-related protein changes detected during midlife remains uncertain. Rather, the study highlights the importance of menopause as an opportunity to study brain aging — and eventually identify factors that promote both risk and resilience.
“Women spend roughly one third of their lives after the menopause transition, yet we know remarkably little about the biology connecting menopause to later-life brain health,” Jacobs said. “These findings give us a new foothold for asking that question and ultimately for identifying who may benefit most from intervention during this critical window.”
The authors note that longitudinal studies following the same women across the menopause transition will be essential to determine how changes in hormones, proteins, symptoms and brain health unfold together over time. UCSB’s team, in collaboration with scientists from around the country, is now launching the Longitudinal Menopause Project to do just that, and they are actively recruiting researchers.
The study was led by Madeline Wood Alexander at Sunnybrook Research Institute in Canada and Rowan Saloner and Kaitlin Casaletto at UCSF, with collaborators from UCSB, UCSF, Stanford University, the University of Toronto and other institutions. The work was supported in part by the Ann S. Bowers Women’s Brain Health Initiative, Wellcome Leap, the National Institutes of Health and the Noyce Trust.
Source: news.ucsb.edu
