Could this be a cure for menopause?

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Despite affecting half of the world’s population, the impact of menopause on health and longevity was rarely discussed until now. There are a few leading the charge on ovarian aging and thus menopause has recently become the subject of longevity studies.

The quest to establish whether menopause should be addressed as an illness or a natural process is as polarizing as climate change

The traditional medical community stand by the mainstream view that menopause is a natural physiological process and inevitable. Indeed, The Mayo Clinic’s site states that menopause requires no medical treatment.

The other side of the argument sees a small but growing number of longevity scientists asserting that it’s time to deal with menopause—or at least for now, substantially delay it. And their hypothesis is that if we do, we’ll not only extend women’s fertility but also postpone the onset of a number of potential health problems.

One of the most vocal researchers leading the change is Jennifer Garrison, an assistant professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in California, who published a paper on reproductive longevity equality, where she asserts that extended fertility in women and longevity are interlinked.

“This conversation between the brain and the reproductive organs, brain-ovaries-uterus, we know some of the words in that conversation,” she says—estrogen, testosterone, neuropeptides. “But in general, I would say that the full lexicon is completely undefined. There’s probably so many other things going back and forth that we don’t know about.” Garrison says.

What we do know, she adds, is that the conversation is a dialogue. The brain exerts influence on the reproductive organs—and vice versa. Small as ovaries may be, they wield outsized power in the body.

“I have a personal interest because I own a pair of ovaries,”

says Garrison, who is in her mid-40s and grew up as the oldest of four sisters. “I did not consent to this thing called menopause, and I do not want to go through it.”

The issue with menopause is not only a litany of often debilitating symptoms, as bad as the symptoms might be, but the real health issues associated with it.

“Overall, our cardiovascular risk increases after menopause,” said Dr. Stephanie Faubion, medical director for The North American Menopause Society and director of the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Women’s Health. Addressing the following  health implications will be the pivotal progression of menopause treatment from masking symptoms to dealing with the root cause:

• Heart disease: Estrogen helps keep blood vessels relaxed and open, and helps maintain a healthy balance of good and bad cholesterol, so when it’s gone, cholesterol may start building up on artery walls, according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Office on Women’s Health.
• Stroke: Lower levels of estrogen may play a role in cholesterol build-up on artery walls leading to the brain, the Office on Women’s Health noted.
• Osteoporosis: Estrogen is the key regulator of bone metabolism.
• Cognitive health: Estrogen is a protective hormone that actually goes inside a woman’s brain, stimulating growth, health and plasticity, and keeping it expanding rather than shrinking as a woman ages, said Lisa Mosconi, associate director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College/NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. The natural drop in estrogen during menopause means women lose this extra “crucially important” layer of protection, she noted.

Current available treatments such as HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) can effectively restore hormone levels but as one size doesn’t fit all, doctors are vastly guesstimating the right dosage for each patient and adjusting as blood testing or the patient’s symptoms show a need for adjustment. This leads to certain women experiencing worse symptoms at the start of HRT.

Life expectancy was around 50 in the 1900s, Faubion pointed out, so women living a third or more of their lifespan after menopause is a relatively new phenomenon. “Is it right for women to be without hormones for that long? We don’t have that answer,” she said.

The average age at menopause is 52. But studies already show that the older a woman is when she goes through menopause, the more likely she is to live longer, Garrison said.

“Reproductive aging in women is a critical thing to address”

As it stands now, she worried women are living more of their lives in a “compromised health state” after menopause, impacting their chances of achieving healthy longevity.

The reproductive longevity field is so new that as recently as 2013, when Garrison’s collaborator Francesca Duncan was at a training course on the biology of aging at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, she was the only person focused on reproductive longevity.
There are a number of pressing questions Garrison and her colleagues aim to answer.

Why do the ovaries age so much earlier than the rest of the body, becoming basically geriatric when a woman is in her thirties?

They also want to understand the biological reasons why we need menopause—or if we even do at all, considering the fact that only a handful of other species, including orcas and narwhals, are known to undergo it. Our close cousins the chimpanzees don’t stop their female cycles until near the age of death.

In a room full of longevity researchers, when Duncan said she was studying ovarian aging, “They looked at me like I had five heads: This is not a system that is aging in a 30-year-old; that’s not aging.” That awareness is changing now, as more researchers begin to ask why women’s age at menopause has barely budged over the past century even as our lifespans grew decades longer.

Taken that the main cause of menopause is ovarian aging, a new ovary rejuvenation  intervention developed by fertility doctors in Greece is bound to address causation.

After one to three months, all participants resumed normal periods. Doctors were then able to retrieve mature eggs for fertilization.