Posted 1 day ago,
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in collaboration with
Dr Christophe de Jaeger (Longevity and geriatrics)
Medical validation:
May 18, 2022
According to a Finnish study, hormonal changes during menopause could lead to an increase in bad cholesterol. A discovery that could contribute to the development of a treatment.
Bad news for menopausal women: bad cholesterol increases during menopause and 11% of this increase is due to variations in sex hormones. This is at least the result of a study published on May 12 in theEuropean Journal of Preventive Cardiology.
Up to 11% increase in cholesterol
Scientists at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, have revealed that during menopause 10% of the rise in bad cholesterol is due to hormonal changes.
To arrive at these results, the researchers observed 218 Finnish women, including 35 who started hormone replacement therapy (HRT) at the start of the experiment.
The average age of the volunteers was 51.7 years and the medical follow-up, which included regular hormonal measurements, was 14 months. Metabolites levels were quantified by a powerful technique – nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR spectroscopy).
During these tests, the researchers observed that menopause was associated with changes in the levels of 85 metabolites, with up to 11% increase in LDL cholesterol, also called bad cholesterol.
These changes, which also included increases in triglycerides, fatty acids, and amino acids, appeared to occur concurrently with decreases in estrogen and increases in follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH). Clearly, these modifications explained the change in 64 of the 85 metabolites, with variations ranging from 2.1% to 11.2%.
“During menopause, there is an increase in total cholesterol, including the bad one. This greatly increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in women. The study seems to go in this direction, confirming the degradation of lipid parameters in postmenopausal women.assures Dr. Christophe de Jaeger.
Towards a new hormonal treatment?
For Dr. Laakkonen, “this study links hormonal changes during menopause to metabolic alterations that promote heart disease”. In other words: menopause predisposes women to heart disease.
This work makes it possible to envisage, in the long term, the development of treatments to avoid bad cholesterol, such as hormone replacement therapy or HRT.
“Our results indicate that the initiation of HRT at the onset of menopause, [ou] during the menopausal transition, offers the best cardioprotective effect“said study co-author Eija K. Laakkonen in a press release.
Nevertheless, the results should be interpreted with caution, as the number of participants on treatment was small and the type of medication used was not controlled.
Women who are considering taking hormone replacement therapy should always discuss this with their treatment doctor as there are various contraindications: history of cancer, stroke, etc.
“The hormonal treatment of menopause remains controversial. It is often put forward to criticize the fact that it could induce hormone-dependent cancers in women, while one of the largest longitudinal studies in progress (PubMed) shows that there is no increased risk of cancer in treated women if the treatment is biologically identical to ovarian hormones”recalls Dr. Christophe de Jaeger.