A comprehensive exploration of women's brain health across the lifespan, examining how cognitive function is shaped by pregnancy, perimenopause, caregiving responsibilities, and daily life demands beyond traditional disease frameworks.
Influential Woman · Womens Health Consulting
Dr. Sabina Khan
Founder, Principal Consultant & Product Manager, Women's Health Collective Consulting
33480, 33480
1Article published
4Awards received
Her Story
About Dr. Sabina
Dr. Sabina Khan is a women’s health strategist, academic, author, and researcher with a career spanning clinical practice, higher education, and health technology innovation. She is the Founder, Principal Consultant, and Product Manager of Women’s Health Collective Consulting, where she advises organizations, startups, and health systems on equity driven program design, scalable digital health solutions, trauma informed care, and women's health programs, including the development of AI powered tools to support women’s postpartum and midlife health beyond traditional care models. She has authored several academic books focused on women’s health, trauma, and motivational interviewing in rehabilitation settings. In parallel, she serves as a professor and researcher, translating evidence into practice across women’s health, occupational science, and population health. Her work bridges research, education, and technology to expand access to high quality, person centered care across the lifespan.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Dr. Sabina
01What do you attribute your success to?
My success stems from a sustained commitment to depth and rigor across disciplines. Building strong foundations in clinical practice, research, and leadership has enabled me to work fluidly across systems and sectors. I have consistently focused on translating ideas into action through scholarship, program design, and technology development. Curiosity, consistency, and an engagement with complexity have guided my professional growth. Collaboration with colleagues who sharpen my thinking has been essential to producing meaningful and durable impact.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The most influential advice I received emphasized cultivating credibility through mastery and integrity. Prioritizing substance, reliability, and ethical leadership builds a reputation that endures beyond individual roles or titles. Expertise developed with intention creates long term professional momentum. When credibility leads, opportunities tend to align naturally. That perspective has shaped how I approach leadership, decision making, and career growth.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Cultivate deep expertise and take ownership of your professional voice early. Master the substance of your field while learning how systems, decision making, and influence function within organizations. Invest in mentors who offer perspective and peers who evolve alongside you. Step into leadership opportunities as they arise, even when growth is still unfolding. Confidence strengthens through experience, responsibility, and visible contribution.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
Women’s health continues to face care fragmentation, particularly across transitions such as the extended postpartum period. This reality creates an important opening for innovation centered on continuity, personalization, and access. Advances in technology, data integration, and trauma informed frameworks support more responsive and scalable models of care. Progress increasingly depends on interdisciplinary collaboration and thoughtful design grounded in evidence. The greatest opportunity lies in solutions that advance both innovation and equity in sustainable ways.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Integrity and intellectual rigor shape my approach to both work and life. I prioritize evidence based practice, ethical responsibility, and respect for lived experience. Equity and compassion inform how I design systems and engage with communities. Accountability and reflection guide continuous improvement and learning. Meaningful impact, grounded in purpose, remains the measure by which I evaluate success.
Her Content Hub
Articles by Dr. Sabina
The Next Frontier in Women’s Health Is the Brain
Why Women's Brain Health Matters Across Every Life Stage—From Pregnancy to Midlife and Beyond
Women's Brain Health
Migraine affects about 1 in 5 women globally, compared with about 1 in 10 men (Rossi et al., 2022). That statistic alone should change how we talk about women's brain health. The brain health conversation women are invited into often begins too late, usually when memory loss, dementia, or neurological disease becomes a concern. But for many women, brain health shows up much earlier: in the middle of a migraine, during postpartum sleep deprivation, through perimenopause brain fog, in the stress of caregiving, and in the mental load of holding together work, family, relationships, appointments, emotions, and everyone else's needs.
Women's brain health is not only about disease; it is about daily function. It is about whether a woman can think clearly, sleep deeply, regulate emotions, make decisions, advocate for herself, return to work, care for others, lead with confidence, and still feel like herself in the process.
For too long, women's cognitive and neurological symptoms have been treated as secondary concerns. Brain fog is minimized. Migraine is normalized. Postpartum overwhelm is dismissed as "just motherhood." Midlife cognitive changes are reduced to jokes about aging. The mental load of caregiving is framed as personality, responsibility, or love, rather than recognized as sustained cognitive labor. But the female brain is not separate from women's lives. It is carrying them. That is why women's brain health may be one of the most important frontiers in women's health today.
A Moment of Growing Attention
We are living in a moment when women's health is finally receiving more public attention. Menopause is being discussed more openly. Postpartum mental health is being taken more seriously. Migraine, pelvic health, fertility, burnout, caregiving, trauma, chronic illness, and health equity are becoming part of broader conversations about quality of life. At the same time, neuroscience is confirming what many women have known for years: the brain is deeply connected to hormones, sleep, stress, cardiovascular health, immune function, pain, relationships, and daily roles.
Pregnancy and the Maternal Brain
Pregnancy is one powerful example. A 2024 study in Nature Neuroscience used repeated brain imaging from preconception through two years postpartum and found widespread neuroanatomical changes during pregnancy, including changes in gray matter volume, cortical thickness, white matter integrity, and cerebrospinal fluid (Pritschet et al., 2024). The study highlighted pregnancy as a profound period of hormonal and neurological adaptation, while also making clear how much remains unknown about the maternal brain.
That evidence should change the way we talk about motherhood. When a postpartum woman says, "I do not feel like myself," she may not simply be describing fatigue. She may be describing a major neurobiological, emotional, relational, and occupational transition. When she says she feels overwhelmed, overstimulated, forgetful, anxious, or disconnected, we should not rush to minimize it as "mom brain." We should ask what her brain, body, roles, sleep, hormones, relationships, and environment are trying to adapt to all at once.
Midlife and Perimenopause
The same is true in midlife. Many women describe cognitive changes during perimenopause and menopause, including difficulty with attention, word-finding, memory, sleep, mood, and mental clarity. A review of cognitive problems in perimenopause notes that cognitive experiences during this transition are heterogeneous, and that depression, sleep problems, and vasomotor symptoms may be associated with cognitive difficulties (Metcalf et al., 2023).
In other words, brain fog is not imaginary, even when it does not indicate dementia or a severe neurological disorder. It can still meaningfully affect how a woman works, parents, leads, communicates, drives, writes, remembers, and participates in daily life. This is where healthcare must become more precise and more humane. A woman should not have to prove that her symptoms are severe enough to matter. If her cognitive symptoms are changing the way she lives, they matter.
Brain Health and Heart Health
Brain health also cannot be separated from heart health. The American Heart Association's Life's Essential 8 identifies eight key measures for cardiovascular health: diet, physical activity, nicotine exposure, sleep, body weight, blood lipids, blood glucose, and blood pressure. The AHA also recognizes that life stages such as pregnancy, motherhood, and menopause can affect women's cardiovascular risk (American Heart Association, n.d.). This matters because the brain is a vascular organ. What supports the heart often supports the brain. Blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose, sleep, movement, and stress are not just wellness topics. They are brain health topics.
The Invisible Load
And then there is the invisible load. Recent research on cognitive household labor has examined the mental work of planning, organizing, remembering, anticipating, and managing family life. One 2024 study found that cognitive labor was associated with women's depression, stress, burnout, overall mental health, and relationship functioning (Aviv et al., 2024).
This is important because women's brain health is not shaped only by hormones or diagnoses. It is also shaped by the relentless responsibility of remembering what must be done, what might go wrong, who needs what, and what cannot be forgotten. Caregiving is often described as love, and it is. But caregiving is also cognitive labor. It requires monitoring, scheduling, emotional regulation, decision-making, advocacy, medication management, financial coordination, and constant vigilance. Over time, that load has consequences.
The Long-Term Stakes
The long-term stakes are significant. The Alzheimer's Association reports that nearly two-thirds of Americans living with Alzheimer's are women, and more than 60% of Alzheimer's and dementia caregivers are women (Alzheimer's Association, n.d.). That does not mean every conversation about women's brain health should begin with dementia. It means brain health must be taken seriously across the lifespan, long before late-life cognitive decline becomes the focus.
Occupation and Daily Life
As an occupational scientist, I have always been drawn to the space between diagnosis and daily life. A diagnosis may tell us what is happening medically, but occupation tells us what it means. It tells us whether a woman can return to work, sleep, remember what she needs to remember, manage the sensory demands of parenting, advocate in a medical appointment, care for her body without losing her identity, and rest without guilt. These are brain health questions. They are also leadership questions. When women's brains are overloaded, unsupported, dismissed, or under-researched, we lose more than individual well-being. We lose creativity, insight, mentorship, caregiving capacity, innovation, professional contribution, and generational wisdom.
Five Commitments
The future of women's brain health must be built on five commitments:
- We must stop dismissing women's cognitive symptoms as exaggeration, aging, stress, or hormones alone. Stress and hormones may be part of the story, but they should not be used as excuses to avoid deeper assessment.
- We must take a lifespan approach, recognizing that brain health does not begin at 65. It is shaped by puberty, education, trauma, pregnancy, postpartum recovery, perimenopause, menopause, sleep, cardiovascular health, chronic illness, caregiving, social connection, and access to care (Livingston et al., 2024; Pritschet et al., 2024; Metcalf et al., 2023).
- We must also integrate care, because women should not have to visit multiple specialists before someone connects the dots between sleep, hormones, mood, migraine, pain, caregiving, work demands, and cognitive function.
- We must use technology responsibly, recognizing that artificial intelligence and digital health tools may help expand education, screening, coaching, and support, but only when they are evidence-informed, equity-centered, and designed around women's real lives, not generic assumptions.
- Finally, we must listen to women as credible narrators of their own health.
That may be the most important point of all. Women often know when something has changed. They may not have the medical language yet, but they have the lived evidence. They know when their mind feels slower, when their sleep is fractured, when their emotions feel unfamiliar, when their memory feels unreliable, when their nervous system feels constantly on alert, or when they no longer feel at home in their own body.
The next frontier in women's health is not simply discovering more about the female brain. It is believing that women's brain experiences are worthy of serious attention. Brain health is not a luxury. It is not only an aging issue. It is not only a dementia issue. It is a daily-life issue. It is how women think, lead, love, recover, mother, teach, create, remember, advocate, and become. If we truly want to advance women's health, we must stop treating the brain as separate from the life a woman is trying to live.
References
Alzheimer's Association. (n.d.). Women and Alzheimer's. https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/what-is-alzheimers/women-and-alzheimer-s
American Heart Association. (n.d.). Life's Essential 8. https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-lifestyle/lifes-essential-8
American Heart Association. (n.d.). Life's Essential 8 for women. Go Red for Women. https://www.goredforwomen.org/en/know-your-risk/lifes-essential-8-for-women
Aviv, E., Waizman, Y., Kim, E., Liu, J., Rodsky, E., & Saxbe, D. (2024). Cognitive household labor: Gender disparities and consequences for maternal mental health and wellbeing. Archives of Women's Mental Health, 28, 5-14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00737-024-01490-w
Livingston, G., Huntley, J., Liu, K. Y., Costafreda, S. G., Selbæk, G., Alladi, S., Ames, D., Banerjee, S., Burns, A., Brayne, C., Fox, N. C., Ferri, C. P., Gitlin, L. N., Howard, R., Kales, H. C., Kivimäki, M., Larson, E. B., Nakasujja, N., Rockwood, K., ... Mukadam, N. (2024). Dementia prevention, intervention, and care: 2024 report of the Lancet standing Commission. The Lancet, 404(10452), 572-628. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)01296-0
Lloyd-Jones, D. M., Allen, N. B., Anderson, C. A. M., Black, T., Brewer, L. C., Foraker, R. E., Grandner, M. A., Lavretsky, H., Perak, A. M., Sharma, G., & Rosamond, W. (2022). Life's Essential 8: Updating and enhancing the American Heart Association's construct of cardiovascular health: A presidential advisory from the American Heart Association. Circulation, 146(5), e18-e43. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIR.0000000000001078
Metcalf, C. A., Duffy, K. A., Page, C. E., & Novick, A. M. (2023). Cognitive problems in perimenopause: A review of recent evidence. Current Psychiatry Reports, 25(10), 501-511. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11920-023-01447-3
Pritschet, L., Taylor, C. M., Cossio, D., Faskowitz, J., Santander, T., Handwerker, D. A., Grotzinger, H., Layher, E., Chrastil, E. R., & Jacobs, E. G. (2024). Neuroanatomical changes observed over the course of a human pregnancy. Nature Neuroscience, 27, 2253-2260. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-024-01741-0
Rossi, M. F., Tumminello, A., Marconi, M., Gualano, M. R., Santoro, P. E., Malorni, W., & Moscato, U. (2022). Sex and gender differences in migraines: A narrative review. Neurological Sciences, 43(9), 5729-5734. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-022-06178-6
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