It is a fight to improve the quality of life

Throughout the existence of our species, we have given menopause, an unavoidable stage of women’s life, for some bearable, for others more suffered. However, the last decades have served us to learn a lot from female reproductive health, and that learning has opened the door to something that would seem unthinkable: delay and even end menopause.

To fight something, the first step is to understand it, and perhaps we are not bad to clarify this concept. Menopause It is the stage that marks the end of female reproductive life, but leads to a series of changes that go beyond the mere end of menstruations.

Menopause It usually occurs In women aged between 45 and 55 and is the process marked by the end of women’s reproductive capacity. The term “perimenopause” is often used to refer to the transition period, a period that usually extends several years.

During perimenopausechanges are experienced both in the menstrual cycle, which can be lengthened or shortened; and at the level of estrogens produced by these organs. Progesterone production also falls. “Unlike other organs, ovaries experience accelerated aging, with a drastic drop in its functionality that begins in the 30,” explained to National Geographic ZEV Williams, director of the Fertility Center of Columbia University.

Menopause not only implies internal changes but also has very palpable effects for those who go through it. Sophocals are perhaps the symptom that we most strongly associate with this process, although all symptoms depend on the case. The List of symptoms Common includes, in addition to changes in menstrual regularity and suffocation, strong or accelerated heartbeat, night sweat, skin redness, or sleeping problems. Changes in the vagina that take pain during sexual intercourse, urine escapes and more frequent infections can also occur.

Menopause is not common in the animal kingdom: only a few species reach the end of their reproductive stage throughout their lives, which has intrigued experts for years. Does it make any evolutionary sense? The truth is that we do not know, so there are different hypotheses to explain this phenomenon.

One of them is the Grandma’s hypothesis. This hypothesis proposes that living after the reproductive stage could have helped our ancestors to take a role beyond the breeding of the first generation of descendants. That is, allowing grandmothers to take care of their grandchildren or other relatives without having their own children to attend.

There are also those who believe that menopause is not due to our evolution but is the effect of our growing life expectancy. While it is true that the human being has a relatively long life expectancy And increasingly extensive, we must bear in mind that throughout history it would not have been strange to see women reaching the end of their reproductive stage.

And yes, life expectancy at birth has changed a lot, but the life expectancy fulfilled an age has done it to a lesser extent. For example, in the 1840s, the life expectancy of a person reached at 10 was over 57 years. More than 60 once the 20th.

Ending with menopause

At birth, the ovules that will give rise to the next generation are already located in the ovaries. We might think that, as it is a limited number of ovules, stretching the amount of menstrual cycles would be impossible, but the truth is that the number of ovules with which it is born gives for several lives, since this number is Between million and two million of gametes. These are disappearing, but it is estimated that during puberty the number of oocytes is about 300,000.

Menopause is not a direct consequence of the exhaustion of these cells but of the aging of the organs that house them, the ovaries. The possibility of delaying the aging of these organs opens a way to prolong their reproductive life and their endocrine role.

One of the promising techniques in this context is frozen ovarian tissue. This is a technique designed to simplify the process of extraction of ovules in people with cancer who want to maintain their fertility after very aggressive treatments.

The technique, still experimental, is based on extracting tissue from the organ, freezing it and then reimpling it, could open the path to delay the menopausal process. According to their developerswhen reimplanting the fabric, this could be reimplanted in successive sessions, gradually lengthening the fertile age of those who decide to submit to treatment. The developers of the technique published last year An article In the magazine American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology in which they detailed their proposal.

The Rapamycin It is a compound that could help us to delay menopause without going through the operating room. It is a already known drugderived from a bacterium, Streptomyces Hygroscopicusand used in other contexts for their immunosuppressive and antiproliferative properties.

Recently, a team led by Williams, tested this drug. The treatment starts from the capacity of this compound to inhibit a protein related to aging, called MTOR. The provisional results of the study They gave rise to optimismbut we would still be in early stages of the investigation.

Often if we have wondered if we can do something we also have to ask ourselves if it is a good idea to do so. Or the less ask ourselves, and all this for what? The answer in this case can be as simple as improving the lives of people who are going through this stage, whose symptoms can lead to a loss of quality of life and whose consequences may be complicated to fit sometimes. But there is even more.

Because trying to stop menopause can also serve us as motivation when it comes to understanding it better, which could lead us to solve indirectly linked problems. For example, we know that the late appearance of menopause It has been associated with a lower bone loss in the elderly, as well as a lower risk of vascular and dementia diseases. Know why it can be of great help when improving the quality of life of the elderly.

In general, societies tend to delay the age of children, something that generates a tension that goes beyond the possibility that we seek to have offspring too late. The late pregnancies They have a whole set of risks that are not given in previous stages. Perhaps the fight against menopause helps us to make these somewhat safer gestations.

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Image | Cottonbro Studio / Nadezhda Moryak