How does menopause affect different parts of the body?

Menopause is usually identified by the end of menstruation, but what happens in the body around this time is not limited to the reproductive system, so understanding when these changes begin can help women better grasp this stage of life.

Menopause means the permanent end of menstruation, and it occurs when ovarian follicles, the tiny structures in which eggs develop, die. Following this, the level of several sex hormones changes. However, it's not just about fertility or stopping menstrual bleeding.

According to Ambassador Arjan, researchers know that menopause is related to changes in various parts of the body. The important question is when exactly these changes start and whether they all happen slowly or some of them take place in a shorter period.

It has not been easy to answer this question. The time of a person's last menstrual period is rarely accurately recorded, and studies that follow people for many years usually have relatively small numbers of participants. As a result, it has been difficult to correlate the body's laboratory changes with the time of the last menstrual period. Clarifying this timing helps to better understand the difference between changes that begin years before menopause and changes that occur close to it. This distinction is also important to explain what women experience in this period.

In this regard, international researchers have conducted a research on how the biological indicators of the body change around the last menstruation. They tried to reconstruct the timing of these changes in different parts of the body and see if the pattern of changes was more gradual or sudden.

They designed a computational method for this task and reviewed more than 300 million laboratory results from more than one million women. The data were related to the years 1999 to 2024. This method allowed them to reproduce the changes measured in the experiments relative to the time of the last menstrual period. Examining two sets of data from two different countries helped them see if the observed patterns could be seen in both sets.

In both data sets, sudden changes were seen in several body parts at menopause. In some data, 52 out of 90 examined experiments had a significant sudden change. These tests included indicators related to sex hormones, bone health, liver and kidney function, blood chemical composition, and blood lipids.

Along with these changes close to menopause, earlier signs were also seen in the level of three hormones. Anti-Müllerian hormone and estradiol decreased more rapidly about 15 and 12 years before the last menstruation, respectively, and the increase in follicle-stimulating hormone accelerated about 14 years before that. The researchers also observed that menopausal hormone therapy was associated with smaller changes in many indices, particularly those related to bone, liver and kidney.

These findings, published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Medicine, provide a more accurate picture of the timing of menopause, some hormonal symptoms may appear years before, while a number of changes in different body systems are sudden near the last menstruation. To describe this pattern, the researchers have used the term "abyss" or step change. Of course, it does not mean that everything will change in one moment, but some body indicators will change in a shorter period of time instead of a uniform and gradual change.

The researchers consider this pattern to be a broad biological transition in women's bodies and not simply a gradual part of aging, as similar changes were not observed in men. However, caution should be exercised in interpreting the results. The research data were retrospective and the information related to menopause was based on self-report. It is also necessary for future research to investigate whether hormone therapy was actually responsible for the smaller changes observed.