The story many women hear about menopause and the brain goes something like this: oestrogen declines, the brain changes, cognitive symptoms appear, and somehow the organ that has carried you through several decades is now beginning to fall apart.

The phrase “brain drain” captures the anxiety rather well.

There is some truth behind the concern: Women going through menopause commonly report problems with memory, concentration and other aspects of cognition, and previous research has found structural differences between pre- and post-menopausal brains. Menopause is a genuine period of neurological and hormonal change.

But a study published this week in Nature Communications suggests that we should think about one part of that story differently than we have.

Sophie van ’t Hof and colleagues at Amsterdam UMC compared brain structural changes across three major hormonal transitions: puberty, pregnancy and menopause. They used longitudinal MRI data and the same analytical approach across all three groups, with stable control groups included to help distinguish changes associated with the transitions themselves from the changes we would expect simply from normal development or ageing (van ’t Hof et al., 2026). In total, the study included 1,095 participants.

The puberty and pregnancy findings broadly followed what previous research has suggested: Girls going through menarche showed widespread reductions in cortical grey matter, as did women transitioning to motherhood. Some of the affected regions overlapped, particularly areas of the........

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