Doctors could one day use a blood test to predict decades in advance when women will go into menopause, scientists say.
In research to be presented at a European fertility conference in Rome today, Iranian experts say their preliminary study could be a first step toward developing a tool to help women decide when they want to have children.
The test does not predict when women will lose their fertility — which typically occurs about a decade before menopause — but if doctors know when women will go into menopause, they can calculate roughly when they will run out of eggs. Scientists say the test could be especially helpful in identifying women who might go into menopause early — in their late 40s or earlier instead of their mid-50s.
At the moment, there are few clues for doctors to tell which young women may be headed for early menopause. Blood tests and ovary scans only give women a few years’ advance notice.
Iranian scientists took blood samples from 266 women aged 20 to 40 and measured the amount of anti-Mullerian Hormone (AMH) in their bodies. Testing the amount of AMH in women tells doctors how many eggs there are left in the ovaries. Two more blood samples were taken in the following six years and physical exams were also performed.
Based on the amount of AMH women had, scientists used a mathematical model to estimate when women would go into menopause.
Of the 63 women in the study who have hit menopause, the researchers’ prediction of the event was accurate to within four months. The study began in 1998 and is ongoing.
“This is not something we could start rolling out tomorrow, but if it really does work, it could be immensely useful to young women who are making choices about whether to work or have a family,” said William Ledger, a fertility expert at the University of Sheffield, who was not linked to the research.
Previous studies in Canada, the US and elsewhere have suggested analyzing AMH could help predict when women will go into menopause, but no long-term studies have yet been finished.
“If our model is validated, then women in their 20s could take a blood test and we could provide them with a good estimate of what her age will be at menopause,” said Ramezani Tehrani, an associate professor at Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in Tehran, who led the study.
Some experts, however, were skeptical a single blood test on young women could be so revealing.
“The principle of measuring AMH is reasonable, but I am not sure you could predict [menopause] decades in advance with one test,” said Nick Panay, a consultant gynecologist at Hammersmith, Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospitals in London.
He thought it might be necessary to test women more often as they got older to monitor if hormone levels dropped off, an indication menopause was imminent.
Doctors said more data should be available about the test’s reliability in about five to six years.
“If we’re using a test to advise women about when to have children or to have [in-vitro fertilization], then it needs to be a very robust test,” said Nicholas Macklon, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Southampton.
He said analyzing AMH was a reasonable way to predict menopause, but that it needed to be validated by tracking thousands more women after they became menopausal.
“It will be extremely valuable to be able to tell women how fast their biological clock is ticking, but people will be making extremely important decisions based on this, so we need to have all the data first,” he said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS