# University of California researchers work on women’s brain health projects with help from pair of awards > Source: > Published: 2026-06-25 14:26:29+00:00 **Getting your** [Trinity Audio](//trinityaudio.ai)player ready...Nearly two-thirds of people living with Alzheimer’s disease are women. But little explanation has been in the offing. With funding from a pair of Alzheimer’s research awards, scientists at UC San Diego in La Jolla are digging deeper in their efforts to understand women’s brain health. One award, worth a total of $50 million and split across 17 investigative teams around the country, is helping two UCSD researchers with their projects. The other award provides funding to a cross-institutional project headed by UC Santa Barbara and involving UCSD and UC San Francisco. #### Pair of projects The first award, from [Wellcome Leap CARE](https://wellcomeleap.org/care/), funds a pair of UCSD projects with undisclosed amounts of money. One project explores the dynamic between menopausal hormone therapy and brain and cognitive health in people’s later years. It’s headed by Judy Pa, a professor of neurosciences at UCSD’s School of Medicine. Pa has studied Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia for 20 years, calling it her scientific passion. She’s also director of the [Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study](https://www.adcs.org/), a partnership formed in 1991 between UCSD and the National Institute on Aging. Over time, Pa became especially interested in gender differences in dementia. “As I started digging more and more into sex differences and why women are [more] at risk vs. men, I got really interested in menopause,” she said. “Even though it’s more of a midlife condition … we’re really trying to think about what’s happening in the brain and the body in their 40s and 50s and how that is conferring, causing or influencing future risk for dementia later in life.” Pa’s project uses existing datasets to emulate a clinical trial. Researchers then will compare results from women who use menopausal hormone therapy with those who don’t. Ultimately, the project aims to better understand whether hormone therapy impacts dementia risk and to better personalize therapies for women with unique menopausal experiences. “The research projects that are deeply needed during this midlife transition don’t exist,” Pa said. “So that’s why we’re doing this research now … to try to gather this data in midlife women to understand how the brain and the body are changing.” The other UCSD project funded under the award is development of an artificial intelligence-backed tool that supports clinical decisions while accounting for risk factors in women. This project is led by Iris Broce-Diaz, an assistant professor of neurosciences in the School of Medicine. By combining clinical data, biomarkers and neuroimaging, the effort aims to better and more efficiently predict dementia risk. “We’re still in the middle of figuring out the specifics, but our models have been developed and validated” in the past year, Broce-Diaz said. “So we’re kind of writing that up now, and we’re ready to start deployment.” With a more effective predictive model, Broce-Diaz hopes to help escalate treatment referrals for people who are especially high-risk. “If you refer them too early, there’s maybe not much they’d be able to do to manage their care,” Broce-Diaz said. “If it’s too late, then there’s things that they missed out on. So I think … the timing of referral is important.” #### Cross-institutional effort Another award funds a new effort by the Ann S. Bowers Women’s Brain Health Initiative — a group made up of UCSD, UCSB and UCSF researchers. Money from an anonymous foundation will enable the scientists to go through with the Longitudinal Menopause Project. Researchers led by UCSB will recruit women ages 40-55 and track them before, during and after menopause. The hope, according to a news release by UC San Diego, is to form the basis of a flagship perimenopausal brain health research program in the United States. #### Other research These are among the latest dementia- and Alzheimer’s-related projects at UCSD. Pa and fellow researchers recently published an in-depth paper about [13 dementia risk factors](https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2026/05/20/women-are-more-vulnerable-to-many-dementia-risks-uc-san-diego-study-says/) and how they’re experienced by men and women. The work, published May 19 in *Biology of Sex Differences*, compares each modifiable risk factor using a dataset of more than 17,000 middle-aged or older adults from the National Institute on Aging’s wide-ranging Health and Retirement Study. Among the findings were that women are more likely to experience depression and sleep problems and be physically inactive, the paper said. Conditions such as hypertension, or high blood pressure (affecting six in 10 participants), and increased body mass index, or BMI (overweight to obese) — though prevalent in both men and women — showed steeper negative associations on cognition in women. Hearing loss and diabetes, both likelier in men, were linked to poorer cognitive scores in women. “I think for a long time, if you look back in scientific research and history, there was this view that if it works for men, it works period,” Pa said. “And there’s this idea now that women are not little men — that our biology and societal impact and our stressors in life are very different than men.” ♦