Dr. Caroline Gervich

You know, part of being an adult is dealing with discomfort.

So the cognitive symptoms of menopause are often described as brain fog.

And the types of symptoms women experience are day-to-day forgetfulness.

It might be in conversation, forgetting a particular word or losing a train of thought.

It might be walking into a room and then forgetting why you've walked into the room.

Some women experience difficulties making decisions or difficulties juggling multiple thoughts.

in their mind or multiple tasks.

So the experiences are varied.

And as you're probably aware, they're not unique experiences.

It's not like you've never experienced these types of cognitive symptoms at any point in your life.

They happen to everyone all the time, but they become or seem to become a lot more common and a lot more frequent and a lot more bothersome during the perimenopause or menopause transition years.

Sure.

So it's quite a long definition and we differentiate it and don't really use the term brain fog, even though that term is used frequently.

quite commonly by the community.

The reason we don't use the term brain fog is because it is used in lots of different contexts.

So people who have chemotherapy often describe brain fog or people have pain or in the context of long COVID, people use the term brain

brain fog and it doesn't really differentiate what is going on during the menopause transition years.

So we've proposed I guess a more sort of operational definition that is self-reported impairment in one or more cognitive areas.

So this could be memory or attention.

in the absence of a notable objective cognitive decline, which can fluctuate.