Book Review: The Menopause Brain

The Menopause Brain by Lisa Mosconi was the first book I read about menopause and I am so glad I started with this one. I first heard about her on this podcast. She sums up the info in her book nicely in this podcast, when the host isn’t interrupting her, but the book has so much invaluable information in it.

The author, Dr Lisa Mosconi is a neuroscientist who has spent years and years doing research and studying the female brain. You can read more about her here. This book is fact based, it is not about her experience with menopause, although she does share some of her personal experiences, the bulk of the book is research based, a lot of which she has done herself.

There were two key points that stuck with me.

The first one is the 3 P’s – puberty, pregnancy and perimenopause. These are the 3 notable periods in a women’s life and how you experience puberty is probably how you will experience pregnancy and perimenopause – so if your skin broke out badly, or you had a lot of anxiety or your periods were bad – you would likely experience that if and when you go pregnant and when you hit perimenopause. She also says your brain goes through the same thing during each of these stages – it does sort of like a computer reset. (She obvioulsy explains it better, so read the book). If I look back at my experience with those 3 stages it is true. I think this is such an important piece of information to have as it allows you in many ways to prepare and understand the changes your body goes through during each of these stages.

The second point was that perimenopause is not a hormone “issue” but rather a brain issue! WHAT?? While menopause does impact your reproductive ability, the whole process is actually driven by the brain, not your lady parts. She talks about this a lot in the book in relation to health care for woman in perimenopause. Women are referred to their gynae for advice on perimenopause but very few gynaes have actually studied this and don’t really know how to treat it effectively, other than prescribing HRT’s. Even though it is a brain issue, neurologists also don’t know how to treat it because they haven’t studied it.

Basically until very recently no one was really studying menopause. There are only TWO types of HRT’s available in the world which in itself is problematic. Women experience this stage of life so differently – how can so many women with such varying symptoms be treated with one of two drugs! This book really does open your eyes to how little has been done in women’s health care in general.

She also discusses who to manage symptoms naturally and a whole host of other things related to this stage of life!

I tell EVERYONE about this book because it gave me so much insight into the changes my body was going through and what I could do to manage them.

I listened to the audio book on Everand but you can get hard copies on Amazon.

If you have listened to this book I would love to hear your thoughts. I would also love any other book recommendations you have – doesn’t have to be menopause related.