How does perimenopause change your brain? | Marija Kundakovic | TEDxFordham University

Despite making up roughly half the world’s population, women’s health has been drastically understudied—especially the brain and mental health across reproductive stages. This talk explores the critical hormonal changes of perimenopause, the 4–10 years preceding menopause, and how these shifts increase psychiatric risk, including mood disorders, anxiety, and even suicide.

Marija Kundakovic presents groundbreaking research using postmortem human brains to map ovarian hormone effects on the brain at cellular and molecular levels. By combining biomarkers from blood, hypothalamus, and pituitary tissues, her team developed a model to determine menopausal status postmortem—paving the way for precision medicine and female-specific psychiatric treatments. This talk highlights the urgent need for education, new science, and actionable solutions to improve women’s mental health.

Marija Kundakovic, PharmD, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Fordham University. Her lab focuses on hormonal and environmental factors driving sex differences in depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders. Kundakovic has been at the forefront of psychiatric epigenetics research since early in her career. Her lab discovered sex-specific epigenetic regulation in the female brain as a function of the ovarian cycle, providing a new molecular framework to study the female-specific susceptibility to psychiatric disorders. More recently, Kundakovic’s lab established the postmortem tissue biomarkers to study cellular and molecular changes in the human brain across the menopausal transition. Her research has been published in top-tier scientific journals and she is an elected member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology and an executive committee member of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx