Repeat brain MRIs found similar rates of gray matter change regardless of menopausal transition

Repeat brain MRIs found similar rates of gray matter change regardless of menopausal transition

On September 8, a Nature Communications article compared repeat brain MRI scans from 1,095 participants during puberty, pregnancy, and menopause. Among 120 women who reported reaching menopause between their two scans, an omnibus statistical test found no differences between the three groups in the rate of change of total gray matter or cortical gray matter.

Brain volume changes with age. The authors tested whether the menopausal transition adds its own pace to these changes by comparing women whose transition occurred between two scans with age-matched peers whose menopausal status remained the same over the same interval.

The menopause arm of the study included 843 women from the UK Biobank, a British medical database. The transitioning group comprised 120 participants who answered "no" to a question about having reached menopause at their first assessment and "yes" at their second. For comparison, the researchers included 49 women who answered "no" at both timepoints and 674 who answered "yes" at both.

Each participant underwent two brain MRI scans. Gray matter is a brain tissue whose volume can be estimated from such scans; the cortex is its outer layer. The authors adjusted for head size and calculated the mean monthly rate of change, because the intervals between assessments differed across groups. In the three-group comparison, the rate for total gray matter and the rate for cortical gray matter were statistically indistinguishable.

The same calculation was applied to puberty and pregnancy. In those two groups, the transition was accompanied by a faster decrease in cortical gray matter compared with age-matched controls. Repeat MRI data yielded different patterns for the three transitions: puberty and pregnancy showed between-group differences, while the menopausal transition did not.