You are listening to Hit Play, Not Pause, a feisty menopause podcast for active performance-minded women.

I am your host, Celine Yeager.

Each week, I bring you advice from athletes, scientists, researchers, and other experts to help

you feel and perform your best no matter what your hormones are doing.

This show is a production of Live Feisty Media.

Hello, strong feisty women.

Boy, do we have an interesting show for you this week.

So women's brains through menopause have been in the news recently.

A study published in scientific reports where they actually did brain scans on women and men ages 40 through 65 found that, yes, our brains, women's brains, actually do change during

perimenopause. There is a dip in gray and white matter and glucose metabolism. So your general

function of your brain changes during this transition, and it's what many women experience as brain fog.

For most women, this fog will clear postmenopause because the brain is what they call plastic.

It makes adjustments and it rebounds, and the studies show that the brain actually did rebound,

like the pictures looked postmenopause,

like they did premenopause for most women. For some women, those changes kind of continue.

And this is an issue that's an area of continued study for obvious reasons. But the science is

clear. The menopause transition affects our brains, and experts are still

uncovering the hows and the wise. My guest this week, neuroscientist Dr. Sarah McKay,

the author of The Women's Brain Book, is one of those experts. Interestingly, her book was the product of a smaller assignment,

an article she was writing about brain fog.

She thought it would be a simple assignment that it was just aging ovaries and waning hormones.

And what she ended up unearthing and finding was a far more complex story that resulted in this book.

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