Perimenopause is a mandatory period in women's life, when the medical staff may initiate hormone therapy with sex steroids for the delay of brain aging and neurodegenerative diseases, during the so-called "window of opportunity." Animals' models are helpful to sustain the still controversial results of human clinical observational and/or randomized controlled studies. Estrogens, progesterone, and androgens, with their nuclear and membrane receptors, genes, and epigenetics, with their connections to cholinergic, GABAergic, serotoninergic, and glutamatergic systems are involved in women'sn o r m a lb r a i no ri n brain's pathology. The sex steroids are active through direct and/or indirect mechanisms to modulate and/or to protect brain plasticity, and vessels network, fuel metabolism-glucose, ketones, ATP, to reduce insulin resistance, and inflammation of the aging brain through blood-brain barrier disruption, microglial aberrant activation, and neural cell survival/loss.
Endocrine and neural senescence overlap in time, by intertwined complex feedback loops. Womens' brain is genetically more prone to suffer during life, and perimenopause is a "critical period" in neuroaging, when the degenerative processes begin. Many hypotheses on the multifactorial nature of women's brain aging are elaborated, and tested in high-tech research centers. The most analyzed Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized not only by Aβ oligomers and fibrils accumulation, but also by metabolic and inflammatory changes, with the onset during menopausal transition and early years of menopause. Deep analysis of endocrine, neural, and metabolic pathways are giving new insights to the sequential view of Aβ-centric in AD pathogenesis, prevention, and treatment from perimenopause, for maintaining women's neurological health.
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