A new study has uncovered the body wide, abrupt changes women experience as they begin menopause, but also found that certain therapy could help to reduce the impact. Researchers in Israel found that women experience what they described as a "physiological cliff" before their final period, whereby many systems in the body undergo change in a sudden space of time, rather than gradually with age. Many of these changes also point towards the direction of increased disease risk.
Menopause is when menstrual periods stop for 12 months or longer, and usually occurs in women around the age of 52 in the U.S., but age can vary from 45 to 55 years or older. However, the experts also found that menopausal hormone therapy – previously called hormone replacement therapy – resulted in less drastic bodily changes for multiple systems in the body, though they cautioned that these findings were observational and required further investigation. The study was published in the journal Nature Medicine on October 12.
The researchers reviewed more than 300 million laboratory tests from over 1 million women across the U.S. and Israel between 1999 and 2024. Uri Alon, the study author and a professor of molecular cell biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, told Newsweek that they saw "gradual changes starting about a decade before menopause on average and accelerating in the years before the final menstrual period and then a jump at the final period." They found that sex hormones started to change in women's bodies long before their final period. Anti-Müllerian hormone – the hormone that plays a role in fetal sex differentiation – and estradiol – a potent form of estrogen – had already begun to quickly decline around 15 and 12 years respectively beforehand.
Meanwhile, follicle-stimulating hormone – a hormone that regulated the growth and maturation of eggs – seemed to increase from around 14 years beforehand. They also found that sudden changes happened across multiple biological systems in the female body before their final period. For example, in the U.S. dataset specifically and in 52 of 90 tests, the researchers identified notable, abrupt changes that affected sex hormones, bone health, liver and kidney function, blood chemistry, and blood fats.
"We can’t say for sure how rapid it is but it looks like it’s within the year of the final menstrual period," he said. Comparable changes were not observed in male individuals either. "When we apply the same approach to data from men they don’t have a jump," he added.
"They show changes of gradual aging over decades. Women also have these gradual changes plus the jump." The researchers said this indicated that menopause is more of an abrupt, multi-system physiological change that happens in the female body, rather than a part of normal ageing. Alon said that these sudden changes happen across body systems affected by estrogen.
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