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Menopause Symptoms can be predicted...studies showThe eggs left in a woman's ovaries can be compared with the sand grains from an hourglass, ticking away slowly the hours of biological clock. Some researchers are saying that they may be able to predict with good results when the clock will stop based on menopause symptoms.Doctors cannot count the number of eggs in an ovary but they can measure ovarian volume using a trans-vaginal ultrasound. British researchers studying menopause symptoms determined a correlation between the number of eggs and the ovarian volume, based on this correlation doctors should be able to determine when a woman becomes menopausal and how many reproductive years a woman has. According to this menopause symptoms study, this information will help greatly women who are looking for assisted reproductive technologies, women treated for childhood cancers or those women who want to start a family later in life. Tom Kelsey is a coauthor of a study appearing June 17 in the journal Human Reproduction and he is saying that the clinical study has to be validated but the first benefiters of the study will most probably be women treated for cancer and women attending fertility clinics. "If women looking for some sort of assisted conception and their physicians know that they've got a long time till menopause, then you could plan for a range of treatments" said Kelsey, who is a senior research fellow at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Based on menopause symptoms "If you knew menopause was likely in four to five years, you'd plan a different set of IVF [in vitro fertilization] treatments." Others researchers, however, strongly recommend that the findings be treated with caution. "Should a young woman who is 30 years old go for a test to figure out whether she's got three, five or 10 years left on her fertility? Should she make career decisions and life decisions? Are these data good enough to make those determinations?" are questions asked by Dr. Alan Copperman, director of reproductive medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. "The answer is obviously no to all of those questions. The predictive value of this test is not good enough to go and tell someone to change their life." The article describes how the eggs in the female ovaries are formed in the womb, reaching a maximum of several millions halfway through gestation and then starts to decrease. At birth, a female child will have several thousands of eggs, decreasing at around 300,000 by the time menstruation begins. At age 37 a woman has around 27,000 eggs and the numbers reaches the 1,000 mark at menopause. The number of eggs reaching a critical threshold will most probably determine the time of menopause. Researchers in this menopause symptoms study measured the volume of ovaries with transvaginal ultrasounds and then at the relationship between the number of eggs and the ovarian volume. As a woman ages the ovaries are shrinking. After the measurements the authors applied mathematical and computer models to predict menopause. Clinical trials are still in negotiations and are based on following women to see if the predictions of the authors are correct. The tool developed in this study could potentially help women plan their life. But the same issue of the Human reproductive magazine published another study that is warning women not to rely completely on assisted reproductive technology when the lack of natural fertility is detected after the age of 35. The authors of the second study determined, using a computer simulated model, that the success rate of assisted reproductive technology in getting pregnant is 30% after age 30, 24% after the age 35 and only 17% after the age of 40. SOURCES for menopause symptoms studies: Tom Kelsey, Ph.D., senior research fellow, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Scotland; Alan Copperman, M.D., director, reproductive medicine, Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York; June 17, 2004, Human Reproduction |
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