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Research in Focus
This month's highlighted article!
Earlier surgical and spontaneous menopause has been linked to faster cognitive decline, but longitudinal data regarding corresponding volumetric brain changes were scarce, and the lasting associations of menopause timing on brain atrophy rates that accompany cognitive decline in women remained unknown. We sought evaluate whether menopause age is associated with cognitive decline, Alzheimer disease onset, and brain volume trajectories in older women and whether this differs by menopause type. We examined this in this cohort study of 2603 older women with a median age at baseline of 78, and found that earlier menopause age was associated with faster cognitive decline (global and episodic), earlier Alzheimer disease onset, and greater white matter hyperintensity accumulation, with the largest effect sizes for structural outcomes observed in spontaneous menopause. The findings suggest menopause age has lasting associations with structural and functional brain aging decades after the menopausal transition itself, positioning it as a midlife-identifiable marker for dementia risk stratification and early intervention.
About the Author - Pia Campagna
Pia completed her PhD in Translational Research at Monash University (Australia) in 2023, where her thesis on the epigenetic determinants of clinical outcomes, including pregnancy-related remission, in multiple sclerosis earned the Vice Chancellor's Commendation for Thesis Excellence. She joined UCSF in 2024 to study molecular drivers of increased vulnerability to cognitive decline with earlier menopause. She pairs this with population-scale work, using biomedical knowledge graphs and large language models to phenotype menopause from unstructured EHR data and test graph-derived mechanistic predictions in real-world clinical cohorts. She is supported by a McKnight Clinical Translational Research Scholarship in Cognitive Aging and Age-Related Memory Loss (2026–28) and a University of California Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship (2025–27).