What Happens to the Brain During Menopause? A New Study Points to an Unexpected Pause
A 2026 study found that the gray matter loss that normally comes with age didn’t show up in women while they went through menopause.
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The brain slowly loses gray matter as we age. A new study found that this loss didn’t show up in women while they went through menopause.
A team led by cognitive neuroscientist Sophie van ‘t Hof of Amsterdam University Medical Center wanted to know whether menopause reshapes the brain the way puberty and pregnancy do. The research, published in 2026 in Nature Communications, is based on more than 1000 MRI scans and remains one of the few studies to follow the brain through menopause.
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The team focused on gray matter, which is the brain tissue that holds most nerve cells. Much of it sits in the brain’s outer layer, also known as the cortex. Findings showed that adolescence and pregnancy reorganized gray matter in the brain in much the same way. Menopause was the surprise. Women who went through it during the study didn’t show the gray matter decline that normally comes with aging. Tracking gray matter changes during these stages shows how the brain adapts to major hormonal shifts, and eventually it could help explain why some women notice changes in mood or thinking around menopause.
Dr. Ramunė Grikšienė, a neuroscientist and professor at Vilnius University’s Life Sciences Center in Lithuania, says brain research has long centered on childhood and adolescence, and only more recently on pregnancy. Menopause has gotten far less attention, and there are many questions yet to be answered.
A Pause During Menopause
“We know that the human brain changes throughout life and gradually decreases in volume with age. This decline even accelerates during puberty and pregnancy,” Grikšienė says. “Thus, researchers expected to see significant changes in brain volume during the menopausal transition as well. But the results told a different story.”
Grikšienė believes the findings on menopause to be among the most fascinating parts of the study. “It seems that the usual age-related changes in brain structure may temporarily slow down or take a different course during the menopausal transition. But this certainly doesn’t mean that nothing is happening in the brain during this time.”
In her view, menopause may be a distinct phase of brain adaptation, with biological mechanisms that researchers are only starting to understand.
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What Puberty and Pregnancy Have In Common
Gray matter volume dropped during both puberty and pregnancy, and it dropped at similar rates. It fell about 0.13% per month in adolescence and about 0.11% to 0.12% per month in pregnancy. The changes spread across much of the cortex and followed a coordinated pattern from one region to the next.
“At first glance, a reduction in gray matter volume may sound concerning,” Grikšienė points out. “During these stages of life, however, it may reflect the brain reorganizing itself and adapting to new demands.”
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In adolescence, brain networks reorganize and become more specialized, which is thought to help the brain work more efficiently. The changes during pregnancy could be happening to help prepare women for motherhood.
“Earlier studies have shown that pregnancy brings pronounced changes in the brain regions involved in social cognition and the ability to understand other people’s mental states,” she says. “These processes are thought to play a role in bonding between mother and baby and in adapting to a new role in life.”
Yet, the two transitions were not identical. For instance, brain regions processing movement and signals from the body changed faster during adolescence than in pregnancy.
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Where Hormones Come In
Estrogen levels tend to rise during puberty and pregnancy and start to fall during the menopausal transition. Given this, the study team expected menopause to display changes in the opposite direction of those stages.
Their results pointed to a more complicated relationship between hormones and brain structure.
“Fluctuations in hormone levels are more than a background biological process for the brain,” Grikšienė explains. “A growing body of research suggests that they may be associated with significant modifications to brain structure and function. To better understand women’s brain health, we also need to take their hormonal status into account.”
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She notes this could also help explain changes in how women feel at different stages of life. “Shifts in mood, emotions, cognitive function, or general well-being during hormonal transitions are unlikely to be coincidental,” she explains. “At least some may be linked to adaptive processes taking place in the brain. But we still need to establish exactly which mechanisms are involved.”
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What The Study Can’t Show Yet
The findings come with limitations. Participants reported their own menopause status, and there were no direct hormone measurements for any group, according to a Nature press summary of the paper. The study team expresses that the link between falling hormones and the pause in gray matter loss still needs to be tested. Menopause follows years of perimenopause, when the supply of eggs in the ovaries gradually drops.
Susana Carmona, a researcher at the Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria Gregorio Marañón in Madrid, told Science News that the brain is already undergoing changes and adjusting during that stretch. Carmona explains that having two scans (one before menopause and one after) might not be enough to capture the change. She sees the work as a useful first step toward further research.
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Van ‘t Hof stresses this point to Science News as well. “Just seeing that there’s a pause in gray matter is not an indication there’s nothing happening”. Her team is yet to test whether the pause relates to cognition, behavior or mental health.
For Grikšienė, the study shows that brain development in women continues well past adolescence and can take different forms over a lifetime. “The female brain is not a static system,” she says. “It is constantly changing and adapting to major biological events in life, yet it may do so differently at each stage.”
