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MEET THE EXPERTS · No. 2 of 10
The neuroscientist who looked inside women’s brains at midlife and saw what medicine had been missing.
Who is Lisa Mosconi?
Lisa Mosconi, PhD, is a neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, where she leads the Women’s Brain Initiative. Her training combines neuroscience with nuclear medicine, the field that uses brain scans to watch the brain at work. She has also written best-selling books that explain this science to everyday readers.
What she saw first
Mosconi started out studying the earliest signs of Alzheimer’s disease, years before memory loss shows up. Along the way she asked a question few researchers were asking: why do women make up about two-thirds of Americans living with Alzheimer’s?
Her answer pointed to midlife. She showed that the menopause transition is not only a change in the ovaries. It is a change in the brain, too.
What the science shows now
In a 2021 study, Mosconi and her team scanned women before, during and after menopause and found changes in brain structure, connections and energy use across the transition. Many of those changes settled as women moved through it.
In 2024, working with Dr. Roberta Diaz Brinton, her team published the first images of estrogen receptors in the living human brain. They found receptor levels rise across the menopause transition, and that higher levels in memory areas were linked to memory and mood symptoms.
WHY IT MATTERS TO YOU
If you have felt foggy, forgetful or not like yourself in midlife, Mosconi’s work says you are not imagining it, and you are not losing your mind. Your brain is going through a real, measurable change. Her research is also a reason to start caring for your brain early, long before anyone talks about memory loss.
Follow her work
Website: lisamosconi.com
Books: Brain Food (2018), The XX Brain (2020) and The Menopause Brain (2024)
Sources
Mosconi L, et al. Menopause impacts human brain structure, connectivity, energy metabolism, and amyloid-beta deposition. Scientific Reports (2021). pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34108509/
Mosconi L, …, Brinton RD. In vivo brain estrogen receptor density by neuroendocrine aging and relationships with cognition and symptomatology. Scientific Reports (2024). www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-62820-7
Alzheimer’s Association. Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures. www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/facts-figures
Dr. Lisa Mosconi is not affiliated with The Broadside. We feature her work because it helps bring new science to everyday people.
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