Age of menopause and dementia risk in 10,832 women from the Swedish Twin Registry.

Introduction: An earlier age of menopause (AOM) is hypothesized to increase vulnerability to the neuropathological processes of dementia which begin in midlife.

Methods: We tested this hypothesis in a sample of 10,832 women from the Swedish Twin Registry, stratified by menopause etiology. Survival models showed that a U-shaped association was present for women whose menopause occurred spontaneously.

Structural and functional sex differences in medial temporal lobe subregions at midlife.

Background: Research has increasingly recognized sex differences in aging and Alzheimer's Disease (AD) susceptibility. However, sex effects on the medial temporal lobe (MTL), a crucial region affected by aging and AD, remain poorly understood when it comes to the intricacies of morphology and functional connectivity. This study aimed to systematically analyze structural and functional connectivity among MTL subregions, which are known to exhibit documented morphological sex differences, during midlife, occurring before the putative pivotal age of cerebral decline.

Health insurance coverage moderates the relationship between metabolic syndrome and baseline memory outcomes in Latino older adults.

Latino adults are at increased risk of metabolic syndrome (MetS) and have lower rates of health insurance (HI) coverage. Although inadequate HI coverage and MetS have been independently linked to poor cognition, their potential interactive effects have not yet been examined. The present study explored whether HI moderated the association between MetS and cognition.

An examination of the clinical utility of phonemic fluency in healthy adults and adults with mild cognitive impairment.

The Controlled Oral Word Association Test (COWAT) is a widely utilized measure of phonemic fluency. However, two issues remain: (1) whether demographic, cognitive variables, or version of test administered predict performance; (2) if the test is predictive of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Recent studies report that item-level analyses such as lexical frequency may be more sensitive to early cognitive change.

Network Modeling Sex Differences in Brain Integrity and Metabolic Health.

Hypothesis-driven studies have demonstrated that sex moderates many of the relationships between brain health and cardiometabolic disease, which impacts risk for later-life cognitive decline. In the present study, we sought to further our understanding of the associations between multiple markers of brain integrity and cardiovascular risk in a midlife sample of 266 individuals by using network analysis, a technique specifically designed to examine complex associations among multiple systems at once. Separate network models were constructed for male and female participants to investigate sex differences in the biomarkers of interest, selected based on evidence linking them with risk for late-life cognitive decline: all components of metabolic syndrome (obesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia, and hyperglycemia); neuroimaging-derived brain-predicted age minus chronological age; ratio of white matter hyperintensities to whole brain volume; seed-based resting state functional connectivity in the Default Mode Network, and ratios of N-acetyl aspartate, glutamate and myo-inositol to creatine, measured through proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

Metabolic Syndrome and Cognitive Function in Midlife.

Objective: Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a cluster of cardiovascular risk factors associated with cognitive decline. We investigated the relationship between MetS and cognition in middle-aged adults. We hypothesized that higher numbers of MetS components will relate to poorer performance on executive function (EF) tasks as frontal lobe regions critical to EF are particularly vulnerable to cardiovascular disease.

Metabolic syndrome components moderate the association between executive function and functional connectivity in the default mode network.

Middle aged individuals with Metabolic Syndrome are at high risk for cognitive decline. Dyssynchrony in the resting state Default Mode Network is one early indicator of brain vulnerability. We set out to explore the relationship between default mode resting state functional connectivity and cognitive performance in both memory and executive domains at midlife in the presence of Metabolic Syndrome components.