62 – How hormones change your brain - Dr Jay Jagannathan
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What role do hormones play in brain health?
So, Jay, I'm very excited for this podcast. We're recording it on a Sunday night because you're super busy, I'm quite busy, but you are a neurosurgeon, so you are the creme de la creme of medicine. I should be bowing and curtsying in front of you.
Well, thank you for having me. I'm a big fan of your podcast. And so I think the value you provide, you know, particularly for women in a perimenopausal phase. My grandmother passed away of a heart attack that went undetected after menopausal age. My mom developed breast cancer shortly after menopause. I think it's very critical, valuable information. And I really applaud your work. So it's an honour to be here.
Thank you. Well, I always try and think differently about things because I think it gets people thinking in different ways. And that's what I'm doing about hormones, about menopause. But some people listening know that I actually wanted to do oncology many years ago. I wanted to do cancer medicine and I only changed my career for lifestyle because I've got three children and I wanted to see them grow up. But my father actually died of a glioblastoma, so a brain tumour, when I was nine. And I remember going to the operating theatre. I was so desperate to meet the... Well, I met him when I was nine, but didn't really remember him, but the neurosurgeon, Professor Watkins in London. Mm-hmm. So when I was a medical student, I went and watched him operate and met him and spent time with him.
And, you know, it's incredible when you see someone's brain, like you do it every day. But, you know, for most of us, it's an area that we'll never see. And we don't think about often, I don't think. We take our brains for granted.
Yeah, I think it's one of the biggest privileges for me in medicine is being able to operate in that part of the body because I think every part of the body obviously is important. But to kind of be in an area which controls, you know, so much of your personality, everything that you know about a person is truly unique. And it's something you never really lose the awe of seeing that no matter how many years you've done it for.
Yeah.
uh it's it's a privilege and i think the other part you know with respect to things like gbm is our knowledge you know the prognosis for gbm in the last you know 100 years with all the advances we have robotics ai uh hormonal therapy you know um uh has really hasn't increased substantially you know it's gone up maybe about four to six months over the course of of many many years so it teaches you how much we have that's left to learn and uh I think, you know, when we look at topics such as what we're discussing here, you know, effects of hormones on brain health, on chemistry, on tumors, things like that. I think what we're talking about today, five years, 10 years will be completely different from what people will be talking about then.
Yeah, I hope so. I'm very interested in the role of hormones throughout our body, but especially our brain.
How do hormonal changes affect memory and mood during menopause?
And I'm also very interested in inflammation and about how our hormones can reduce inflammation in our bodies, but in our brain as well. But a lot of people think once our brain has developed, there's a lot of talk, isn't there, about children, adolescents, you know, their brain, how it develops. And then people think it's almost quite stagnant after then. But there's neuromodulation going on all the time, isn't there, in our brain? You know, our brain is constantly almost rewiring.
The brain is constantly rewilding. There are certain parts of the brain, obviously, that tend to be more fixed. There are certain parts of the brain that tend to develop over the course of age. And the size and the shape of the brain changes, too. You know, with all of us, as we get older, the brain mass tends to decrease. There are changes in proportions of areas, such as gray matter and white matter, that happen as we get older as well. And there are effects of hormones, such as estrogen, on those factors I'm sure we'll discuss in this podcast as well. And even aside from the structure, there are areas in the brain, such as fluid spaces, the ventricles, things like that, that change in terms of size and in terms of compliance as we get older.
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Chapters
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