If you’re feeling forgetful, or just find it hard to really focus your brain, and you’re in your 40s or 50s, you’re in good company. It’s a fact that two thirds of women experience ‘brain fog’, during perimenopause, the years leading up to menopause. And it’s natural to wonder, is this the start of a slippery slope to dementia?
“Lots of my patients come in and say, I forgot to turn up to lunch with a friend three times in the last three weeks, I think I've got dementia,” says Dr Ginni Mansberg, author of Save Your Brain. So here’s what she wants you to know. “If you can't remember where you put the keys, that's called ‘normal’. But if you don't know what to do with the key, we call that dementia.”
So what is menopausal brain fog then?
Explains Dr Mansberg, “Brain fog peaks in perimenopause when some days your oestrogen is sky high, and some days it's through your bootstraps. We know brain fog links with low oestrogen levels. It also links in fairly well with depression. And we know that perimenopause is a period of vulnerability for anxiety and depression - and that can definitely make your brain fog worse.
“But we don't really know why brain fog is such a massive perimenopause issue and why it seems to start getting better a year after menopause.”
So that’s the good news, it’s not linked to dementia, and with time it shall pass.
But what you do now can have a huge impact on your risk of developing dementia later on. (The symptoms generally start to emerge after the age of 65.) In fact, studies now show that up to a third of dementia cases can be prevented entirely, and in the rest can be delayed by as much as five years by doing things in our 40s and 50s to protect our brain.
Find out Dr Mansberg’s simple ways to protect your brain by listening here. (Hint: playing computer brain-games isn’t one of them!)
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