World Menopause Day Health News Round-Up

In order to provide variety in this week’s round-up, not all of this is menopause-related, but it is all important:

Menopause & CVD

Untreated menopause is associated with higher incidence of heart disease, and higher mortality. People often forget about how much estrogen does for us (well, for those of us with a physiology running on estrogen, anyway; gentlemen, your testosterone is fine for you), and think it is “just” a sex hormone, but it’s a lot more.

Read in full: Menopause transition linked to increased heart disease risk

Related: What Menopause Does To The Heart

Extraterrestrial medical technology

The much lower gravity in Earth orbit has allowed for tissue engineering techniques that Earth’s normal gravity imposes limitations on. This is big news, because it means that rather than replacing a whole liver, tissue implants could be grafted, allowing the extant liver to repair itself (something livers are famously good at, but they need enough undamaged base material to work with).

Read in full: How liver tissue from the International Space Station may transform tissue engineering

Related: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver

One thing and then another

As if endometriosis weren’t unpleasant enough in and of itself, the endothelial dysfunction inherent to it also raises cardiovascular disease risk. This is important, because while endometriosis has (like many maladies predominantly affecting women) generally been shrugged off by the medical world as an unhappy inconvenience but not life-threatening, now we know it comes with extra existential risks too:

Read in full: Understanding cardiovascular risks in endometriosis patients

Related: What You Need To Know About Endometriosis

Push-button meditation

Unlike mindfulness meditation, listening to music is a very passive experience, and thus requires less effort from the user. And yet, it has been associated with lower perceived pain levels, lower self-reported anxiety levels, less opioid use, and measurably lower heart-rate.

Read in full: Listening to music may speed up recovery from surgery, research suggests

Related: Nobody Likes Surgery, But Here’s How To Make It Much Less Bad

Cholesterol in menopause: quality over quantity

Much like previous research has shown that the quantity of LDL is not nearly so predictive of health outcomes in women as it is in men, this study into HDL and menopausal women shows that quantity of HDL does not matter nearly so much as the quality of it.

Read in full: HDL quality, not quantity, contribute to the first sign of Alzheimer’s disease in women

Related: Statins: His & Hers? ← consistent with the above, statins (to lower LDL cholesterol) generally help more for men and produce more adverse side effects for women. So again, a case of “the actual amount of cholesterol isn’t so important for women as for men”.

Take care!