Blood pressure and white matter health
Published KEEPS Continuation work examines how blood pressure and menopausal hormone therapy context relate to later-life white matter hyperintensities.
Research note
Women's Brain Aging
A public synthesis of published work on menopause-related exposures, vascular risk, PET/MRI biomarkers, cognition, preclinical models, and later-life brain health.
Why This Matters
Women's brain aging is shaped by reproductive aging, menopause timing, surgical menopause, vascular health, sleep and vasomotor symptoms, hormone therapy exposure, and Alzheimer-related biology. My work in this area uses MRI, PET, MR spectroscopy, blood pressure and cardiometabolic measures, preclinical models, and cognitive outcomes to understand how these factors converge in later-life brain health.
Premenopausal Bilateral Oophorectomy
Premenopausal bilateral oophorectomy provides a clinically important window into how abrupt ovarian hormone loss may influence brain aging. Published work suggests associations with later-life cognitive performance, white matter integrity, and Alzheimer's disease imaging biomarkers, with age at surgery and hormone-therapy timing remaining important research questions. My interest is in using multimodal imaging and biomarker approaches to understand these mechanisms in a careful, translational way.
Public Evidence Map
Public Research Themes
Hormone therapy and imaging biomarkers
Public KEEPS imaging analyses connect amyloid PET, MRI, white matter measures, and prior randomized hormone therapy exposure in recently postmenopausal women.
Long-term cognitive outcomes
KEEPS-Cog and KEEPS Continuation publications provide cognitive outcomes that complement imaging and vascular measures.
Vasomotor symptoms and sleep
Symptoms such as night sweats, hot flashes, and insomnia are important public research questions for understanding hippocampal structure and broader brain-aging biology. No unpublished submitted abstract results are described here.
Ovarian hormone deprivation and brain integrity
Published mouse-model work connects ovarian hormone deprivation with functional connectivity, MR spectroscopy, white matter integrity, cognition, myelination, and Alzheimer-related biology.
Selected Published Work
- Long-term amyloid PET and MRI outcomes in a menopausal hormone therapy trial.
- Associations of blood pressure with white matter hyperintensities later in life; influence of short-term menopausal hormone therapy.
- Long-term cognitive effects of menopausal hormone therapy: findings from the KEEPS Continuation Study.
- Premenopausal bilateral oophorectomy and Alzheimer's disease imaging biomarkers later in life.
- Premenopausal bilateral oophorectomy and brain white matter integrity in later-life.
- Long-term effects of 4 years of menopausal hormone therapy on white matter integrity.
- Association between central adiposity and cognitive domain function in recently postmenopausal women.
- Cardiometabolic outcomes in Kronos Early Estrogen Prevention Study continuation: 14-year follow-up of a hormone therapy trial.
- Association of raloxifene and tamoxifen therapy with cognitive performance, odds of mild cognitive impairment, and brain MRI markers of neurodegeneration.
- Long-term ovarian hormone deprivation alters functional connectivity, brain neurochemical profile and white matter integrity in the Tg2576 amyloid mouse model of Alzheimer's disease.
- Image-guided phenotyping of ovariectomized mice: altered functional connectivity, cognition, myelination, and dopaminergic functionality.