Treating Hot Flashes May Improve Cognitive Symptoms: Study Author Explains the Connection

Findings from a new study presented at The Menopause Society's 2025 Annual Meeting held October 21-25 in Orlando, Florida, confirm that age-related declines in brain volume are normal and not accelerated by menopause. The data counter previous reports suggesting menopause-specific effects on brain structure at midlife. To get more insight, Patient Care^® spoke with coauthor Katrina Wugalter, MA, a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago, during the meeting. In the video above, Wugalter shares key takeaways from the study.

For more details on the study design and results, check out part 1 of our interview with Wugalter here.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for style and clarity.

Patient Care: What are the key messages or takeaways that you want clinicians and healthcare professionals who read this study to take away from it?

Katrina Wugalter, MA: Yeah, I would say that there are a couple key takeaways. So the first one would be that women are experiencing normal age-related declines in brain volume at midlife, and those declines are not accelerated by menopause, according to our study. But we possibly would want longitudinal studies that follow the exact same group of women over their menopause transition to really confirm and make definitive conclusions.

But from our study, one of the takeaways is that this is normal age-related decline, which means if women want to maintain their brain structures at midlife, we should focus on lifestyle factors that optimize aging, rather than focusing on factors that are related to menopause, because this is an age-related decline and not a menopause effect when we talk about brain structure.

But another takeaway—maybe this would be for researchers—is that if these cognitive symptoms of menopause are not caused by this brain structure question, then what other factors should we as researchers be looking at? I think some important factors that we should turn our attention to would be brain function. So as I mentioned before, the kind of activation or connectivity of brain regions.

And I think we should spend a little bit more time thinking about other menopause symptoms. So it's possible that cognitive symptoms are a downstream effect of other menopause symptoms like vasomotor symptoms. There is evidence that women with more frequent vasomotor symptoms have poor cognitive performance and worse brain health outcomes.

So for women and for their care providers, I think the first step is always treating those menopause symptoms that do have first-line treatments—such as vasomotor symptoms—and seeing how women are feeling from there.