CONTEXT Growing evidence challenges the concept that high-density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C) is cardioprotective after menopause. HDL particle concentration (HDL-P) and cholesterol efflux capacity (CEC) might be better predictors of cardiovascular risk. OBJECTIVE Quantify alterations in HDL-P and CEC during menopause, correlating those changes with alterations in estradiol (E2) and FSH. ...

This article analyzes the contemporary construction of male menopause as a clinical disorder. While medical interest in a male climacteric has waxed and waned over the past century, the past decade has witnessed a surge of both scientific and commercial interest in its diagnosis and treatment. In explaining why this is the case, the author suggests that shifting cultural narratives of aging and...

Polyfluoroalkyl chemicals (PFCs)—chemicals used in the manufacture of stainand water-repellant products—are suspected endocrine disrupters. Animal studies have suggested an association between exposure to two of the most commonly encountered PFCs (perfluoro octanoate, or PFOA, and perfluorooctane sulfonate, or PFOS) and altered hormonal function, although evidence in humans remains inconsistent...

The magnitude of negative selection on alleles involved in age-specific mortality decreases with age. This is the foundation of the evolutionary theory of senescence. Because of this decrease in negative selection with age, and because of the absence of reproduction after menopause, alleles involved in women's late-onset diseases are generally considered evolutionarily neutral. Recently, geneti...

This paper illustrates the need for human biologists to take into account the far-reaching influences of biomedicine in the study of reproductive aging. Data were drawn from western Massachusetts and Puebla, Mexico, to illustrate the effects of hysterectomy rates, tubal ligations and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) on studies of age and symptom experience at menopause. First, in examining age...

In contrast to the relatively stable hormone profile during the middle reproductive years, the perimenopause is marked by erratic fluctuations of oestrogen and progesterone. By the late perimenopause, oestrogen levels can reach high magnitudes.1 Given the association between migraine and oestrogen ‘withdrawal’ it is not surprising that this stage of life is often accompanied by worsening migrai...

What generates health? What makes us move in the direction of health? These simple and original questions created an opening to a new way of thinking in health research. It was raised in the late 1970ies by Aaron Antonovsky, a medical sociologists interested in stress theory who had undertaken a traditional epidemiological study on the effects of menopause on women who had undergone extremely s...

Breast cancer is a heterogeneous malignancy; its age-specific incidence profile rises exponentially until menopause and increases more slowly thereafter, reflecting the superimposition of early-onset and late-onset breast cancer rates. While early-onset breast cancers largely represent inherited or early life transforming effects on immature mammary epithelium, late-onset breast cancers likely ...