Guest post: Predicting the menopause – maybe?

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Guest post: Predicting the menopause – maybe?

June 29, 2010 by theantiroom

Guess what? Scientists reckon they can now predict when a young woman will start into the menopause by testing her for levels of a particular hormone. Well, so it would seem anyway from reports like this one. A study of 266 women in Iran aged between 20 and 49 measured their levels of anti-mullerian hormone (AMH, it’s made by the ovaries) over a number of years as well as finding out about their reproductive and family histories.

From all this, the researchers came up with a formula to forecast when menopause would start, and apparently they claimed their model could predict whether a woman in her 20s would have an early menopause (before 45). Now before we go wondering whether we want to gaze into that particular crystal ball, can I just point out that these results were presented at a conference – the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology – so they are not in the gold standard of a peer-reviewed paper for starters. Plus the study itself is pretty small, so any rush to extrapolate to half of the human race is probably premature.

But it raises the intriguing notion that some day a woman may be able to waltz into a clinic in her youth and find out at what age she will start the so-called ‘change of life’.

Would you want to know?

Claire O’Connell

5 Responses

on June 30, 2010 at 10:48 am | Reply Annie

I don’t think I would want to know. Not to trivialise ‘the change’ but whilst it will obviously affect my life in years to come, it’s something that you deal with in time, when it happens. I don’t see how knowing when it’s going to happen would make a major difference in how you would deal with it.
on June 30, 2010 at 1:01 pm | Reply Ruth Crean

I don’t think I would want to know, I know my mother went through hell and I wouldn’t want a date set on that time for me.

I can see how knowing would maybe be useful if deciding to have children later on. I can think of a friend of mine who is a good bit older that me in her early 40’s and she is faced with the decision of whether she wants to children. She is not particularly happy in her relationship, so in this case I can see that I definite date would force someone to get off the fence.
on June 30, 2010 at 2:04 pm | Reply claireoc

I can see how women might want to know from a fertility perspective, but even reading the reports on this piece of research it seemed to sound more like a lightswitch or a juggernaut headed for a cliff rather than a more gradual process. From what little I know of the menopause, you don’t just wake up one day ‘in it’ and you are no longer fertile. But I guess it would give a woman a line in the sand…

You’d wonder if these kinds of predictive tests will become the norm, much like many of our mothers didn’t have ultrasound scans when they were pregnant, but it’s standard here now.
on July 2, 2010 at 11:08 pm | Reply Clare

I def wouldn’t want to know. I’d be living my life with a date flashing red in my mind as the day I hit this major milestone. I’d rather live blissfully ignorant.
on August 4, 2010 at 9:37 pm | Reply Susan J Caldwell

Please, I want to know, Im so looking forward to it, sick of erratic mad bleeding twice a month, menopause, I welcome you!!!