Womens Brain Health

Women make up roughly two-thirds of people living with Alzheimer's disease, experience migraine at close to three times the rate of men, and are diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at a similar ratio — yet for most of modern neurology's history, the default research subject was male. Women's Brain Health is the field correcting that imbalance, asking a deceptively simple question: what changes in the brain when sex chromosomes, hormonal cycling, pregnancy, and menopause are treated as variables that matter rather than as noise to be controlled for?

The Women's Brain Health session at the Neurology Conference brings that question into clinical focus. Rather than surveying female neurology as a single topic, this session organises discussion around the specific biological windows where risk, resilience, and treatment response diverge by sex — puberty, the menstrual cycle, pregnancy and the postpartum period, perimenopause, and the decades after. Presentations span Alzheimers Disease risk architecture in women, hormonally-triggered Chronic Migraine, the pregnancy-modulated course of Multiple Sclerosis, and the diagnostic delays that still shape how women reach neurological care.

The session is built for clinicians who see these patients, researchers designing the next generation of sex-stratified studies, and policy voices working on trial representation. What sets it apart is its willingness to sit with the unresolved questions — hormone therapy and dementia risk, whether menopausal cognitive change predicts anything at all, and why a condition as common as intimate partner violence–related brain injury remains largely absent from the neurological literature.

Why Women's Brain Health Needs Its Own Research Agenda:

The case for a dedicated session is epidemiological before it is ideological. Several of the most prevalent neurological conditions are not evenly distributed between sexes, and the imbalance is large enough that sex-blind models systematically underperform for half the population.

• Dementia burden: Women account for the majority of Alzheimer's cases worldwide, a gap only partly explained by longer life expectancy.
• Migraine and headache: Prevalence diverges sharply after puberty and tracks hormonal transitions across the lifespan.
• Autoimmune neurology: Multiple sclerosis, neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder, and myasthenia gravis all show female predominance, with the MS ratio having widened in recent decades.
• Mood and anxiety disorders: Roughly twice the prevalence in women, with distinct hormonal trigger points.
• The evidence gap: Women were routinely excluded from clinical trials until the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993, and sex as a biological variable only became a formal NIH design requirement in 2016. Much of the foundational neurology literature therefore rests on male-dominant cohorts.