The average age of menopause lies between 46 and 52 years of age. Given that the average life expectancy of women in developed countries lies around 81 years, women will on average spend almost 40% of their lives in a postmenopausal state. An important health challenge facing postmenopausal women involves maintaining a healthy brain, given that in 2018, dementia was the leading cause of death for women in Australia and the UK. In part this is due to increased life expectancy, however, more research is required to determine what role menopause may have in contributing to brain health.

A key challenge is that changes associated with menopause can be difficult to disentangle from ageing effects, given that they co-occur. Consequently, careful methodological and statistical considerations that likely require large sample sizes are necessary to adequately detect whether a possible effect of menopause exists on brain health, beyond the effect of ageing. This question is a core focus of my thesis, which aimed to investigate direct and indirect associations between menopause and brain health. Firstly changes in fat mass and cholesterol/lipid profiles around menopause were examined. Then, the association between changes in central fat and the brain were investigated. Finally, direct associations between measures of menstruation history (including menopausal status and age of menopause) and the brain were examined.

About Ananthan

Ananthan Ambikairajah is a PhD Scholar at the Centre for Research on Ageing, Health and Wellbeing, within the Research School of Population Health at the Australian National University. He is a passionate neuroscientist, educator and science communicator. Ananthan’s research interests include genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors which influence brain health, with a particular focus on neurodegenerative diseases, such as dementia. His PhD thesis has focused on the direct and indirect associations between menopause and measures of brain health.