The menopause question your neurologist and your gynecologist both skip

Hi Phoenix friend,

I am launching “Monthly Themes” inside the Phoenix Community where every month we will cover a new important topic relate to brain health, longevity and APOE4.

This month: Hormones and Menopause.

Here is a gap almost nobody fills.

Your neurologist thinks about your brain and does not prescribe hormones.

Your gynecologist thinks about hormones and does not track your dementia risk.

And you carry an APOE4 gene, sitting in the middle of both, during the exact decade when they overlap most.

Nobody joins those dots for you. So you end up doing it alone, at midnight, with fifteen browser tabs open and no one to tell you which one matters.

I carry APOE4/4. That was my midnight too. It is why I built Phoenix, and it is what a group of us is working through together this month.

What August looks like inside Phoenix

Every month inside our private community now runs on one rhythm: one topic, one small action, one month, together.

August is The Menopause Window: hormones and your APOE4 brain.

And it started with a small, telling thing. Back in the spring, one member asked a real question about hormones inside the community. It drew 27 replies. Then almost nothing. In a community that is largely women, largely in or past menopause, this is the question asked least and needed most.

So this month, we are doing it properly. With two experts, a live call, and questions submitted by members.

Two experts worth listening to

Both sessions are recorded, so members submit questions in advance and get real, prepared answers.

Steve Goldring, RPh. Thirty years a pharmacist, most of them answering menopause questions until he made it his life's work. He teaches women and the doctors who prescribe for them. We walk the hormone menu in plain English: patch versus pill, estradiol versus the older estrogen, progesterone versus a progestin, and how to get taken seriously by a prescriber who is brushing you off.
We have already recorded part one of the Q&A (we are doing 2 parts as it ended up being waaaay longer than expected to answer everyone’s questions).

Dr. Ashanthi Gajaweera, MD. A board-certified neurologist with 25 years in practice who runs a dementia-prevention clinic, and one of a small number of neurologists in the country to also hold the Menopause Society Certified Practitioner credential. Most neurologists do not do hormones. Most menopause specialists do not do dementia prevention. She does both. She covers why this transition matters for prevention, how to think about APOE4 and hormones honestly, and what a sustainable year actually looks like.
Next week I will post the podcast thread in our community Circle space and you will be able to ask your questions there.

There is no clear-cut answer

You will find three studies online, pointing three different ways, and think someone is lying to you.

One found APOE4 carriers on hormone therapy had better memory and larger memory-region brain volumes. One found APOE4 carriers on hormone therapy had worse brain protein markers. And the largest review ever done, over a million women, found no effect on dementia risk either way.

All relatively robust. None of them a trial built to answer our exact question, because that trial has not been run.

Most communities pick the version that makes the best headline. We hold all three, and help you make a calmer decision with your own clinician. That difference is the whole point of Phoenix.

(One thing most people missed: in November 2025 the FDA removed the black-box warnings from estrogen products, including the dementia warning, calling the old reading of the 2002 study outdated. Twenty years of fear, quietly revised, and barely reported.)

The part you cannot get from an article: the room

Reading about this alone is not the same as talking it through with people who are living it.

This month we are launching Phoenix Community Live: a monthly, roughly 60-minute live call inside the community. Everyone checks in. New members introduce themselves. And we take the month's theme and talk it through, out loud, as a group.

That is the thing an article can never give you. A room of people who get it, on the same night, working the same problem.

I move fast, on purpose

I built Phoenix because I needed it first, and I build it the way I wish someone had built it for me: quickly.

In recent weeks I shipped Phoenix 2.0, then 2.1, rebuilt the daily check-in on web and mobile, opened a free clinical-trial engine tracking about 1,300 dementia trials, launched a free directory of clinicians who take APOE4 seriously, and completed the first issue of our real-world APOE4 research. Now a monthly theme and a live community ritual.

APOE4 carriers do not need another organization that takes a year to summarize last year. You need the research translated now, the better clinician now, the pattern in your own data found while you still have time to act on it.

You can keep doing this alone

You can read the papers alone. Interpret your labs alone. Weigh the three conflicting studies alone. Wonder, alone, whether starting hormones at your age is smart or a mistake.

Plenty of carriers do.

But you do not have to.

Inside Phoenix this month, you would submit your one hormone question, watch two experts answer it, set a single baseline in the app, and then talk the whole thing through on a live call with people who carry the same gene.

Joining takes about seven minutes. There is a 60-day money-back guarantee, so the only real risk is staying outside the room.

→ Take the seven-minute assessment to join Phoenix

I built Phoenix because I carry APOE4/4 and needed it first.

Now I am building it for every carrier who refuses to wait quietly for symptoms.

Cheers,
Kevin

Most Newsletters? One-way street.
How boring…
This is the Phoenix Community. So let's make it a two-way street.
Got a question? Feedback?
Hit reply. I read every single one.