Menopause Status and Within-Group Differences in Chronological Age Affect the Functional Neural Correlates of Spatial Context Memory in Middle-Aged Females

Reductions in the ability to encode and retrieve past experiences in rich spatial contextual detail (episodic memory) are apparent by midlife—a time when most females experience spontaneous menopause. Yet, little is known about how menopause status affects episodic memory-related brain activity at encoding and retrieval in middle-aged premenopausal and postmenopausal females, and whether any observed group differences in brain activity and memory performance correlate with chronological age within group. We conducted an event-related task fMRI study of episodic memory for spatial context to address this knowledge gap. Multivariate behavioral partial least squares was used to investigate how chronological age and retrieval accuracy correlated with brain activity in 31 premenopausal females (age range, 39.55–53.30 years; mean age, 44.28 years; SD age, 3.12 years) and 41 postmenopausal females (age range, 46.70–65.14 years; mean age, 57.56 years; SD age, 3.93 years). We found that postmenopausal status, and advanced age within postmenopause, was associated with lower spatial context memory. The fMRI analysis showed that only in postmenopausal females, advanced age was correlated with altered activity in occipitotemporal and parahippocampal cortices during encoding and retrieval, and poorer spatial context memory performance. In contrast, only premenopausal females exhibited an overlap in encoding and retrieval activity in angular gyrus/inferior parietal cortex, midline cortical regions, and prefrontal cortex, which correlated with better spatial context retrieval accuracy. These results highlight how menopause status and chronological age, nested within menopause group, affect episodic memory and its neural correlates at midlife.