Dr. Caroline Gervich

And those factors independently can impact cognition significantly.

at any point in anyone's life.

And for many women, it just coincides with a really busy time in their life.

So midlife for women, particularly in our current world, is really busy and people are often stretched and stressed and that in and of itself, taking all the hormone changes, even taking sleep and mood changes out of the picture, that can also just lead to people having lapses in attention and concentration and memory

So unfortunately, most of the research is a bit skewed and most of the studies tend to report on women who are

are in first world countries and are professional women.

And that's where most of the research is conducted.

So I think we just don't have that data that's clear enough for me to comment on that.

kind of this consensus is it that women are looking for other causes potentially for their cognitive symptoms and perhaps blaming other things that they're missing out on therapies that might actually help what are the harms a few things i think one what you just said so a lot of women become really concerned about their cognition and in a search for explanations a few things frequently pop up so one is that women become concerned that they have the early stages of dementia

The second one that seems to be popping up more frequently is that women question whether they have an underlying ADHD that's been somehow uncovered by the menopause transition or exacerbated by menopause.

Some women either feel that they're no longer up to whatever work that they were doing and leave work or change the type of work that they're doing.

I've met many women who are now post-menopausal who have quite significant regrets and

share their experiences of what they went through during menopause, not understanding that it might have been a relatively temporary cognitive symptom that's quite common and might have a different explanation.

What do the options for managing these symptoms look like?

So at the moment, we don't have a good answer.

evidence base in terms of clinical trial evidence base for the use of menopause hormone therapy.

However, anecdotally, a lot of women do find benefit from different combinations of hormonal support.

There are lifestyle strategies that help cognition for anyone at any point in their life, and they also are helpful during menopause.

So these are things like

ensuring you exercise, you get adequate sleep, which is a tricky one during menopause because sleep is often... Yes, sleep is often... Exactly.