What: Stat’s Elizabeth Cooney has a deep dive looking at the Science Advances papers on women’s brains, including how hormone replacement therapy (HRT)—especially *when* women take it—may affect Alzheimer’s risk.

Key line: “’These two papers add to the growing evidence that, for menopausal hormone therapy, timing is everything, and the ‘critical window hypothesis’ for estrogen applies not only to heart disease but also to cognition and Alzheimer’s disease,’ said [JoAnn Manson, principal investigator of the Boston site for the overall Women’s Health Initiative], who is also chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. ‘Whether early initiation of hormone therapy could help to mitigate this excess risk is an intriguing and pressing question.’”

Source: Stat