Your Brain May Thank You More For This Workout After Menopause

You walk into a room and forget why you're there. Or it takes a couple of extra seconds for a familiar name to come to you. Or you sit down to answer one email and end up bouncing between five tabs.

Everyone has experienced a day with attention difficulties like this, but changes in attention and focus are a common, and especially frustrating, symptom of menopause.

For many women, this shift motivates them to make brain health a bigger priority.

Researchers wanted to know whether menopausal status affects how women respond to aerobic exercise. They analyzed data from 93 cognitively healthy women ages 20 to 67, with 43% classified as postmenopausal.

The women were randomly assigned to either an aerobic exercise group or a stretching and toning group. For six months, they exercised four days a week for about an hour. The aerobic group could choose equipment such as a treadmill, elliptical, or stationary bike, with exercise intensity gradually increasing during the first month before reaching the target level.

The biggest difference showed up in the executive-function score, which was a combination of two tasks. One tested how well participants could switch between different rules, while the other measured how often they broke rules while learning a maze. The results from these tasks were combined into an overall executive-function score.

Rather than simply comparing scores at the end of the study, researchers looked at how participants' scores changed over time. They found statistically significant differences at both three months and six months.

Postmenopausal women in the aerobic exercise group showed greater improvement than postmenopausal women in the stretching and toning group. Within the aerobic group, postmenopausal women saw more improvement than the premenopausal women.

However, the benefit also wasn't seen across every cognitive skill. Researchers found no menopause-specific difference in processing speed, memory, attention, or language.

One is simply that the postmenopausal women started with lower executive-function scores, leaving more room for improvement. At the beginning of the study, their average executive-function performance was lower than that of the premenopausal women.

The researchers also discussed the "exercise timing hypothesis," which suggests that the timing of physical activity in relation to changes in estrogen could influence how the body and brain respond to exercise later in life.

Baseline levels of fitness may also contribute. Aerobic exercise strengthens the cardiovascular system and can improve blood flow and oxygen delivery to the brain, which could be one reason it had a stronger effect on executive function than stretching and toning.