Written by Trinity King
Menopause is a natural part of ageing that usually marks the end of a woman’s reproductive years. Often characterised by hot flashes, brain fog, sleep problems, emotional changes, and irregular periods, it is the point at which a woman’s ovaries stop releasing eggs, and your body produces less estrogen.
Most view menopause as something you go through once in your life and then move on from, but doctors and researchers are beginning to become interested in when it happens and how this may affect a woman’s health. Some women reach menopause in their early forties, others closer to sixty, with the average age in the United States being 52.
A study from 2023 looked at thousands of postmenopausal women in the United States to explore a simple but important question: does the age at which a woman reaches menopause have anything to do with how common cervical cancer is in this group? Cervical cancer develops in the cells of the cervix, often after long‑lasting infection with human papillomavirus (HPV). Most cervical cancer research typically focuses on areas relating to Pap smears, HPV burden, and HPV vaccinations, not menopause, so this connection may sound surprising at first.
Figure 1 Cancerous cervical cells (Created in BioRender.com).
To investigate it, researchers used data from a large national health survey (NHANES) that asks women about their medical history, lifestyle and reproductive health and records this data. They focused on women who were already past menopause and recorded two key facts: how old they were when their periods stopped, and whether they had ever been diagnosed with cervical cancer. They then considered other influences on cancer risk, such as smoking, body weight, blood pressure, and diabetes, and corrected for these variables in the statistical model.
After vigorous statistical analysis, their findings suggest that menopause timing could be one of several clues doctors use when thinking about long‑term gynecologic health and screening, especially for cervical cancer. It is important to keep in mind, though, that the study does not prove that early menopause causes cancer, merely that the cancer co-occurs significantly more often with early menopause than with late menopause. It’s not the whole story, but it may be an important piece of the puzzle in gynecologic health.
References:
Cheng G, Wang M, Sun H, Lai J, Feng Y, Liu H, Shang Y, Zhao Y, Zuo B and Lu Y (2023) Age at menopause is inversely related to the prevalence of common gynecologic cancers: a study based on NHANES. Front. Endocrinol. 14:1218045. doi: 10.3389/fendo.2023.1218045
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