Premature Menopause: A Warning Signal for CVD Risk

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hello. I am Dr JoAnn Manson, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. I'd like to talk with you about a recent report from the UK Biobank that was posted in JAMA. The study examined the association between premature menopause (before age 40) and the risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD). This study included more than 144,000 women, and they looked at a broad composite endpoint of CVD, including coronary heart disease, stroke, heart failure, venous thromboembolism, and other vascular endpoints.

The study also looked separately at premature natural menopause and premature surgical menopause due to bilateral oophorectomy. They found that the hazard ratio for the composite endpoint in premature natural menopause was 1.36, and for premature surgical menopause, the hazard ratio was 1.87. The risk for individual vascular endpoints tended to increase as well. They also saw that cardiovascular risk factors such as hypertension, high cholesterol, and diabetes were all generally increased in the women with premature menopause.

They looked at age at menopause with a little more granularity and saw overall that there was a gradient, such that the women with the earliest age at menopause tended to have the highest risk for CVD.