Mosconi The XX Brain

The Groundbreaking Science Empowering Women to Prevent Dementia
Main
ISBN: 978-1-76087-082-9
Verlag: Allen & Unwin
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten

Women are far more likely than men to suffer from anxiety, depression, migraines, brain injuries, strokes and Alzheimer's disease. But, until recently, scientific research has focused on 'bikini medicine,' assuming that women are essentially men with different reproductive organs. The XX Brain presents groundbreaking research showing that women's brains age distinctly from men's, due mostly to the decline of a key brain-protective hormone: estrogen. Taking on all aspects of women's health, including brain fog, memory lapses, depression, stress, insomnia, hormonal imbalances and the increased risk of dementia, Dr. Mosconi introduces cutting-edge, evidence-based methods for protecting the female brain, encompassing diet, stress reduction and sleep. She also examines the effectiveness of hormonal replacement therapy, addresses the perils of environmental toxins and explores the role of our microbiome. Luckily, it is never too late to take care of yourself.

Dr Lisa Mosconi, PhD, is the director of the Women's Brain Initiative and the associate director of the Alzheimer's Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College, where she serves as associate professor of Neuroscience in Neurology and Radiology. She also is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine. Formerly she was the director of the Nutrition & Brain Fitness lab, and led the Family History of Alzheimer's disease research program at the NYU Department of Psychiatry. She is a board-certified integrative nutritionist and holistic healthcare practitioner.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mosconi, Lisa

Leseproben

FOREWORD

I AM A DAUGHTER OF Alzheimer’s disease.

My father, Sargent Shriver, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2003. In 2011, he passed away from the disease. He’d been blessed with a particularly sharp mind, a beautifully tuned instrument that often left us awed and inspired. It was stunningly painful to watch this walking encyclopedia of a man go from knowing what seemed to be so much about so many things to being unable to recognize what a spoon or a fork was or remember my name—let alone being able to recall his own.

It was my father struggling with Alzheimer’s, and later my mother suffering from a stroke (a strong risk factor for dementia), that propelled me to make it my mission to help find a cure for this devastating illness.

For over fifteen years, I have been on the front lines of the fight against Alzheimer’s. As an activist and as a journalist, I work to raise awareness of this disease and to find ways to protect the precious future of America’s minds. I’ve testified before Congress, founded the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement, produced the award-winning with HBO, written a bestselling children’s book on Alzheimer’s to start a conversation across generations, and executive-produced the Oscarwinning film , the story of a woman beset with dementia.

In 2010, in collaboration with the Alzheimer’s Association, I published , in which we reported publicly for the first time that two-thirds of all those who end up with Alzheimer’s are women. This startling fact prompted me to make women the top priority of my Alzheimer’s advocacy.

Think about it. Every sixty-five seconds another person develops Alzheimer’s disease; and of these newcomers, roughly two-thirds will be women—and we still don’t know why. For a woman over sixty, the risk of developing Alzheimer’s is twice that of developing breast cancer. With risks this steep, why isn’t anyone and everyone talking about this crisis?

It is also women who make up two-thirds of the 40 million unpaid American caregivers—17 million of them attending to dementia patients alone. Perhaps not surprisingly, comparable figures are found the world over. These caregivers are women who simultaneously work inside or outside their homes (or both). While juggling a life that often includes caring for young children, women take on the arduous task of caring for loved ones suffering from dementia, too. The latter is an enormously strenuous job in and of itself. With their own health risks already at stake, how are these women expected to take adequate care of themselves while coping with the daily physical burden, stress, and grief to which they are exposed—day in, day out, year after year?

Addressing these questions has been at the heart of my work at the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement, or WAM. One of the most critical missions at WAM is to educate women about their risk for developing this devastating disease—and, perhaps even more important, to empower them with the information they need to take charge of their lives, health, and families by learning to care for their brain throughout their lives. We also fund women-based Alzheimer’s research and are now developing ways to put that research to practical use. Our goal is to help establish medical centers of excellence, designed for people, especially women, to find the doctors and expertise they need to learn how to delay or prevent Alzheimer’s disease. We know that there are distinct pathways to developing the disease in women that differ from those in men, and that there are specific junctures in a woman’s medical journey that may increase her risk for developing the disease. So why not learn as much as we can about a woman’s brain and its connection to her overall health so we can offer interventions, thereby delaying, if not preventing, the onset of Alzheimer’s?

The book you have before you, , does nothing less than lead the way.

Dr. Lisa Mosconi has devoted her entire career to studying this very issue. She, too, has a story impacted by Alzheimer’s. Lisa’s grandmother was one of four children; she had two younger sisters and a brother. All three sisters would die of Alzheimer’s while their brother was spared. As Lisa’s grandmother became too ill to function, Lisa’s mother took on the grueling role of primary caregiver and, along with it, the heartbreak, stress, and exhaustion that comes with shouldering such a task. Lisa witnessed firsthand how Alzheimer’s appeared to selectively target the women around her, while seeing the brunt of the caregiving also fall to the women of the household. The myriadfold impact this had on her life drove her to search for the answers you’ll find in this book.

Dedicating her life’s work to this mission, Lisa now offers a means by which women can protect themselves from dementia, whether that means caring for others or suffering from the disease ourselves.

As you’re about to read in the pages ahead, the medical profession has long accepted a gender disparity when it comes to brain health—one that was explained away by the fact that women tend to live longer than men. But now we know that other things are going on as well.

While most scientists in the field were focused on the hallmark plaques and tangles that Alzheimer’s is known for, Lisa sensed a link between metabolic health and the increased Alzheimer’s prevalence in women. She followed her gut, suspecting that our hormones might play a key role in rendering women more vulnerable to the disease. Thanks to Lisa and other like-minded scientists dissatisfied with the status quo, a movement began that was determined to take a closer look at how sex hormones, and the very XX chromosomes that inspired the title of this book, have unique impacts on our health as women. As it turns out, along with Alzheimer’s, other conditions such as depression, stress-related illnesses, autoimmune diseases, and inflammation all affect women differently, and often more dramatically, than they do men.

I met Lisa when I went to get a cognitive baseline test from a leading expert in the Alzheimer’s prevention field, Dr. Richard Isaacson. Richard started an Alzheimer’s prevention program at Weill Cornell and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, an idea way ahead of its time. WAM has been supporting his efforts since 2016, as he looks for the scientific evidence to prove a link between lifestyle interventions and an improvement in cognitive function, including reducing one’s risk for Alzheimer’s. In 2017, Richard introduced me to the new scientist he had just lured over from another hospital to work alongside him as associate director of the clinic, knowing that I would be interested in the work she was pursuing, given its focus on women. Lisa had just published the first study to show that women’s brains become more vulnerable to Alzheimer’s in the years leading up to and after menopause, and much of her work since has been on looking at the connection between younger women’s hormones and the impact on their brains. She is one of the reasons we now know that women need to start thinking about brain health not after menopause but decades before. Her innovative work led us to invite her to join the WAM Scientific Advisory Council; and starting in 2018, we also began funding one of her research projects.

When I was interviewing her on the show, Lisa said something that struck me to my core: “Eight hundred and fifty million women all around the world have just entered, or are about to enter, menopause.” Let me repeat: . She continued, “As if hot flashes, insomnia, and weight gain weren’t enough, for some women, menopause may well be the beginning of a lifelong battle with dementia.”

Clearly, we need a solution.

As a society, we’re not sufficiently aware of how hormonal and health issues especially relevant to women—certain medications, pregnancy, perimenopause, even lack of sleep—affect our . Most of the prescription drugs women take have been tested only on men. Most of the doctors that women my age are used to seeing are male. Unless he’s your gynecologist, he’s not talking to you about hormones. He’s not talking to you about menopause. No one’s talking to you about perimenopause.

This uniquely female physiology both merits and demands wonder, respect, and research in ways we are only just beginning to adequately address. Perhaps this crisis, precipitated by an Alzheimer’s epidemic that hits women so relentlessly from every angle, might at the same time trigger a revolution in women’s health care—one that has been such a long time coming.

It is in this very spirit that Dr. Mosconi comes to the rescue.

Lisa’s work has been pivotal in discovering that a woman’s brain is more sensitive to hormonal fluctuations, as well as to specific medical and lifestyle risk factors, than a man’s. In , Lisa meticulously guides us in the ways we can both nourish and protect ourselves, body and mind, to ensure our brains remain resilient throughout our lives—before, during, and after menopause. She will teach you to be your own detective in understanding and testing for your own risks, prime you in the process of crafting a...