Topic
The point at which twelve months have passed since a person's final menstrual period, together with the perimenopausal hormonal transition leading up to it.
Weizmann Institute researchers analyzed more than 300 million lab tests from over a million women and report step-like shifts at menopause. In the Nature Medicine paper the largest changes sit in bone metabolism, liver tests and lipid handling.
Reality
Toronto and UCSF researchers report that older women with higher levels of 16 menopause-linked molecules were 15 percent likelier to develop Alzheimer's. The authors see menopause as a window for early-warning testing, though the evidence so far is a correlation.
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Science's women's health issue traces sex differences in disease across all ages, including functional pain women experience at about twice men's rate. Its editors say political attacks and research funding cuts make the work urgent.
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UCSF researchers tied 16 blood proteins that shift with menopausal hormones to a 15% higher Alzheimer's risk in nearly 12,000 older women. Those women were in their 60s and 70s, so a menopause screening test would need a study that follows the same women from midlife.
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A new Gallup and Pivotal survey measures how women's healthcare experiences carry into work, family and civic life. The work figure is the one benefits teams will reach for, though the survey put its questions to women only.
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Menarche and pregnancy each leave a permanent step down in cortical gray matter. At menopause an Amsterdam-led team found no change at all, and the design compared one scan before the transition with one after.
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Lab work shows how estrogen could keep neurons healthy, and an August analysis in Neurology found fewer dementia diagnoses among women on estrogen-only therapy. The researchers who study it still want randomized trials.
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A two-scan study of 1,095 female brains in Nature Communications finds the ordinary adult decline in cortical gray matter flattening through late perimenopause and resuming afterward. Its first author says the implications are hard to state.
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