Project summary

Through this research project, I’ll map interactions between executive function decline, hormonal shifts, prefrontal cortex restructuring, and neuroinflammatory proxies in perimenopausal women to identify early risk markers for AD.

This project will be further developed into stratification frameworks and screening protocols for dementia risk assessment in women during NHS menopause health checks, bridging a gap in women’s aging research.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

The Problem: 

• Women are twice as likely to get dementia, accounting to ⅔ patients worldwide.

• But menopause has been historically overlooked, so its role in brain aging is still not clear. 

• Because menopause-related brain fog affects 50% gradually, it’s frequently dismissed as normal aging → we are missing the key transitional window that can predispose women to the development of major neurodegenerative diseases. 

• Most studies focus on amyloid and tau pathology → this leaves the question about hormonal influence on brain aging unanswered 

The project:

• This study will investigate hormonal triggers (primarily, estradiol) that affect neural pathways in the brain and create loss of grey matter, triggering neuroinflammation and further functional decline. 

• At the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience, we will model the relationship between prefrontal cortex structural decline and executive function, mediated by hormonal and neuroinflammatory proxies, to identify a threshold where hormonal depletion and neuroinflammation drive normative cognitive aging into a neurodegenerative pathology. 

The result:

In the end, we will release an open-source computational pipeline for ML algorithm development for other researchers to apply this framework for their own brain aging studies.

How will this funding be used?

The funding will be used for neuroimaging screens analysis, data access fees, and computational infrastructure to train machine learning algorithms based on the experimental material to to pilot a diagnostic software

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

I am a neuroscientist, investigating brain aging and dementia development, with research experience at Sirius University, Cambridge Centre for International Research, Semmelweis University, and Hungarian Research Network.

For the past year and a half, I have been focusing on cognitive aging during menopause, researching how hormonal changes predispose women to dementia development. The results of my study showed that menopausal women show worse inhibitory control and working memory capacity, which underlined estrogen deficits and age-related functional compensation of the prefrontal cortex.

Now, I aim to expand this research further, incorporating neuroinflammatory biomarker testing to identify early susceptibility risks for dementia development.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

• There is a risk that it won’t be possible to differentiate ordinary cognitive aging from the early dementia development in women, as the menopausal transition won’t be the biggest decisive factor that contributes to neural deterioration. 

• Also, it is possible that vascular factors and metabolic changes can cause "brain fog" and be mistaken for dementia signs. However, in this research, multiple biomarkers (estrogen, progesterone) and neuroimaging modalities will be applied (MRI and EEG) to prevent such risks from happening. 

• Overall, even with such outcomes, with this research project I will be able to bring new findings about the impact of menopause on cognition and provide data on the specificity of dementia development in women. In addition to this, regardless of the results, the computational pipeline for the ML algorithm will be released openly and can be applied to other neuroscientific projects. 
  

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

None yet; this is the first crowdfunding application for this project