Studies on menopause have always had to cope with the date of the final menstrual period varying enormously, which blurred the data due to the variable onset ages. But a innovative technique finds a distinct ‘physiological cliff’ related to the onset of menopause – and significant changes for a decade and a half preceding it.
To get around the problem of the variable onset age of menopause, researchers made use of a computational method originally used for astronomy and applied it to map large-scale biomedical datasets by anchoring health markers to the final menstrual period.
By analysing hundreds of millions of laboratory tests from two independent populations, scientists uncovered a step-like physiological cliff across endocrine, skeletal, hepatic, renal, and lipid systems that coincides precisely with menopause. These abrupt physiological shifts – which are of course completely absent in male control cohorts – often signal an increased risk of disease and begin more than a decade before menstruation permanently ceases. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates that menopausal hormone therapy significantly attenuates these abrupt biological disruptions, restoring postmenopausal test trajectories to resemble a smoother continuation of earlier health patterns.
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