Early menopause makes your body age more quickly
AS if the hot flushes, mood swings and disturbed sleep weren’t miserable enough – now scientists say that the menopause also speeds up ageing.
Research suggests that the earlier a woman goes through the menopause the faster her body deteriorates, raising her risk of an early death.
Insomnia also seems to take its toll, with post-menopausal women who toss and turn at night nearly two years older biologically than those who sleep soundly. However, hormone replacement therapy appears to have a rejuvenating effect.
Researcher Steve Horvath said: ‘For decades, scientists have disagreed over whether menopause causes ageing or ageing causes menopause. Our study is the first to demonstrate that menopause makes you age faster.’
Professor Horvath, of the University of California, Los Angeles, estimated the biological age of more than 3,000 women, including hundreds of Britons, by looking for tiny changes to their DNA in their blood cells.
It is already known that people with more of these changes are more likely to die at any given time. They are also at higher than average risk of lung cancer. He found that women who went through menopause earlier had more of these changes, as did women whose ovaries had been surgically removed, forcing them into menopause.
And the longer it was since a woman’s menopause, the faster her biological clock was ticking.
Professor Horvath said: ‘We discovered that menopause speeds up cellular ageing by an average of 6 per cent. That doesn’t sound like much but it adds up over a woman’s lifespan.’
Take, for example, a woman who enters early menopause at age 42. Eight years later, her body would be a full year older biologically than another 50-year-old who is just entering the menopause.
Colleague Dr Morgan Levine said: ‘On average, the younger a woman is when she enters menopause, the faster her blood ages.
‘This is significant because a person’s blood may mirror what’s happening in other parts of the body, and this could have implications for death and disease risk.’
The average British woman hits the menopause around 50. However, 1 per cent go through the menopause before 40.
A second study, also led by Professor Horvath, linked lack of sleep in later life with faster ageing.
There, post-menopausal women with five insomnia symptoms were nearly two years older biologically than women the same chronological age with no insomnia symptoms.
Researcher Judith Carroll said: ‘We can’t conclude definitively that the insomnia leads to the increased [biological] age, but these are powerful findings.’
It is thought that the fall in sex hormone levels that occurs at menopause speeds up the biological clock.
And the research, published in the journals Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Biological Psychiatry, showed that boosting hormone levels with HRT kept some cells young.
Professor Horvath said: ‘Unfortunately, HRT has been found to increase the risk of certain kinds of cancer. In my opinion, there is a need for novel kinds of hormone therapies that provide women with benefits of HRT, while minimising the risks.’
‘It adds up over a woman’s lifespan’