About This Project

Many women experience brain fog, memory lapses, anxiety, and mood swings during peri/menopause – yet we still don’t know what drives each person’s experience. This study will collect large-scale diverse data from women aged 35–60 to uncover the key determinants of cognitive and mental challenges in midlife. We’ll use health, reproductive, cognitive, and mental health questionnaires to uncover how background and health factors drive challenges experienced during peri/menopause.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Over one billion women worldwide are currently navigating the menopause transition. While often framed narrowly as a reproductive milestone, emerging evidence shows it is also a critical neurological transition. During this period, the brain undergoes biochemical and structural changes, influencing cognition, mood, and sensory processing.

Over 80% of women report cognitive symptoms such as brain fog, memory lapses, slowed thinking, attentional difficulties, and fatigue during perimenopause. These symptoms can profoundly impact quality of life, relationships, and work, yet their causes remain poorly understood. Research has mostly focused on hormones, leaving unanswered questions about the role of lifestyle, prior health, stress, and social determinants. This project will collect large-scale, real-world data to understand why some women face severe cognitive and mental challenges in menopause while others remain largely unaffected.

What is the significance of this project?

Menopause-related brain changes reduce health outcomes, strain relationships, and lower quality of life. In the UK alone, 1 in 10 women leave the workforce and 14 million workdays are lost annually due to brain fog, memory lapses, and other cognitive symptoms, costing an estimated £1.8B in GDP each year. Peri/menopause often coincides with women’s peak career years, making this loss of expertise a major issue for companies and a significant hit to women’s wellbeing.

Access to care is inadequate: 30% of women visit GPs 5–10 times before diagnosis (45% for minorities), and 44% wait over a year for treatment. Globally, menopause costs $810B in health and productivity losses.

This study will go beyond previous work by using a single, large-scale survey to capture a full health profile and conduct detailed phenotyping, not just one measure of brain fog, but a nuanced mapping of cognitive and mental health, to identify key drivers and inform prevention and support strategies.

What are the goals of the project?

This project aims to collect large-scale, high-quality data on the factors influencing cognitive and mental health challenges during peri/menopause. We will recruit and pay 1,000 participants, ensuring representation across diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, with an initial focus on Europe and the UK. Participants will be recruited through a trusted academic platform (prolific) with screening, using filters to ensure diversity and include only those with a strong participation track record.

They will complete a comprehensive online questionnaire covering health history, lifestyle, and lived experiences of brain fog, memory lapses, mood changes, and related symptoms. We will go beyond one-off brain fog measures to map detailed cognitive and mental health while capturing health data.

This will help identify background and health-related drivers of individual symptom profiles and support refinement of the tool for future use in prevention, support strategies, and research.