Book by Lisa Mosconi, PhD, 2020
“The XX Brain (2020) is a practical guide to improving women’s brain health and preventing Alzheimer’s disease. Women are suffering from an Alzheimer’s epidemic, but so far the medical industry isn’t doing much about it. The XX Brain shows you how to take your health into your own hands, demand the medical treatment you deserve, and take concrete steps to help prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s.”
Key Ideas:
- Women’s health is in crisis because of inequality in the medical field.
- Hormonal transitions like menopause radically affect brain health.
- Alzheimer’s isn’t a natural part of getting older or necessarily hereditary – it’s usually preventable.
- To determine your risk of Alzheimer’s, take stock of your overall health.
- Menopause hormone therapy has its detractors, but we shouldn’t rule it out.
- Eating a balanced, nutritious diet is the way to optimize your brain health.
- Regular, low-intensity exercise is essential for brain health. And the older you get, the slower the better.
- It’s time to tackle the stress epidemic that is harming women’s health.
- Intellectual stimulation will help your brain to thrive.
The strong message in this book
“Historically, medicine has been dominated by men. Male doctors consulted male scientists who conducted experiments on overwhelmingly male subjects. Medicine has come to see the human body as de facto male.
The problem is that the makeup of women and men’s bodies is different. For example, a woman having a heart attack doesn’t present with the same symptoms as a man. Instead of chest pain, women typically have flu-like symptoms such as sweating and nausea. And that means they’re seven times more likely to be misdiagnosed and sent home, mid-heart attack.
Women metabolize medicine differently to men as well. Researchers found that the recommended daily dose of the sleeping pill Ambien is actually harmful to women because – you guessed it – the dose was tested on men.
The medical establishment has long treated women’s health with what’s known as “bikini medicine”: seeing women as different in terms of their reproductive organs, but otherwise physiologically identical to men. But that overlooks one vital area of difference: the brain.
Women are twice as likely as men to experience depression or anxiety. They experience four times as many migraines and are three times more at risk of autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis. Most worrying of all, two out of three Alzheimer’s patients are women. In fact, a woman of 45 has a one in five chance of developing the disease over the course of her life. A man of the same age has only a one in ten chance.
Addressing women’s health goes far beyond the “bikini.” More than a medical issue, it is an equality issue. Women deserve to have their health treated as an urgent priority – as urgent as a meteor, silently hurtling its way toward Earth.”
Some quotes from “The XX Brain”
Moms do not sleep. Moms hover in a state of semi-consciousness, waiting for someone to need something.
Given everything we’ve discovered about the relationship between hormones, menopause, and brain health, a larger question remains: Can the use of birth control affect the health of the brain? Oddly enough, even though more than 100 million women take the pill worldwide, there have been only a handful of studies dedicated to its effects on the brain.
Excerpts from some of the reviews
“Dr. Mosconi boldly takes the question of what differentiates men from women away from just the reproductive organs and focuses on the unique characteristics of the female brain. And it is about time! When 2/3 of Alzheimer’s patients are women, clearly a manifestation of the female brain’s uniqueness, we must take notice. The XX Brain is fully empowering, leveraging the very best science allowing women to enhance cognitive health and gain control of their brain’s destiny.” David Perlmutter, MD, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Grain Brain
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