Endocrine Abstracts

Despite widespread sex differences in prevalence and presentation of numerous illnesses affecting the brain, there has been limited focus on the effects of endocrine aging on brain and mental health in females. The majority of preclinical studies have focused on males only, and clinical studies often analyzed data by covarying for sex, ignoring relevant differences between the sexes. This sex-neutral approach is biased and can contribute to failures of health care providers to deliver targeted treatments and services for all sexes. In my talk, I will spotlight female brain health by informing on the role of sex steroids, particularly estradiol, on the female brain across the lifespan. I will present our work on sex steroid fluctuations and their impact on the female brain across the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and menopause using dense-sampling approaches, large population-based datasets, and machine learning tools. A better understanding of the dramatic changes in the female brain across the lifespan is a critical step towards mechanistic models explaining sex differences in disease susceptibility and a crucial prerequisite for the development of personalised mental health care.