Creating the UC Menopause Collaborative: An Opportunity for Research and Clinical Collaboration

The average age of menopause for women in the US is around 51 to 52 years old.

This demographic is a growing population, with 30% of women being over the age of 50.

And women are living longer.

Average life expectancy in the US is 81 years old.

So women are spending up to 40% of their life after the menopause transition.

And women in midlife are literally super women.

They're juggling so many things, facing unique stressors and responsibilities at midlife, including caring for elderly parents, issues with childcare or empty nest syndrome, may be dealing with new health issues, they may be at the top of their careers and requiring high executive functioning, and likely they have limited time for self-care.

So now you add to this the neuroendocrine shift of menopause.

That can be hot flashes, disturbed sleep, insomnia, mood changes, and you have a disruption of a finely tuned equilibrium that is already stretched very thin.

So, alarmingly, over 50% of women don't receive care for their menopause symptoms and fewer than 5% receive menopause hormone therapy.

And this is important because we know untreated symptoms impacts well-being in the short term.

Untreated symptoms have been associated with significantly lower quality of life measures impaired daily functioning, higher relationship and family stress and home disturbances, work effects and impairment with higher presenteeism and work nonproductivity.

And a Mayo Clinic study from 2023 showed that the economic burden of annual lost workdays in the US is $1.8 billion.

And the total annual economic burden related to menopause symptoms is $26 billion.

So it's got a huge economic impact there.

So there is no one single menopause experience.

And this is what makes it challenging sometimes to treat is that you've got multiple organs and organ systems involved.

There's been described 60 plus symptoms of menopause.

We know that vasomotor symptoms are the most common menopause symptoms affecting up to 80% of women.

with a varying degree of frequency and severity.

Vasomotor symptoms on average can last 7 to 10 years, but 10% of women can have lifelong symptoms, so they may need treatment indefinitely.

Other common menopause symptoms include disruptions in sleep, mood, and cognition, fatigue, weight gain, low libido, and genitourinary symptoms.

So every person experiences the menopause transition uniquely, and there's not a one-size-fits-all approach that's appropriate.

So what we have going on as well with menopause symptoms is they don't present necessarily one at a time, but they can present altogether as a cluster of symptoms.

Driving the symptoms are the hormonal changes, the fluctuations in estradiol and the decrease in estradiol.