Health

New blood test can predict when women will hit the menopause two years in advance, scientists claim


A BLOOD test can accurately predict when a woman will hit the menopause two years in advance, scientists claim.

The new check, which measures the levels of a key hormone, can also tell how many eggs she has left.

 The new blood test could help alert couples that time is running out to have a child

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The new blood test could help alert couples that time is running out to have a childCredit: Alamy
 Researcher Dr Nanette Santoro from the University of Colorado Medical School

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Researcher Dr Nanette Santoro from the University of Colorado Medical School

It could help alert couples that time is running out to have a child.

Until now, medics used the frequency of a woman’s periods to estimate the onset of menopause.

But this method is much less accurate as it only narrows the window to a four-year period.

The average age for menopause in the UK is 51 – with around two million Brits affected at any one time.

It is triggered when the body stops making the hormone oestrogen, and can cause a wide range of symptoms, including mood swings, poor sleep, joint pain and lack of concentration.

US researchers said the new test will be particularly useful for women considering surgery to alleviate heavy periods.

It measures levels of a hormone in the blood known as the anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH).

Researcher Dr Nanette Santoro, from the University of Colorado Medical School, said: “Establishing a way to measure time to the final menstrual period has long been the holy grail of menopause research.

“Using bleeding patterns or previously available tests to predict the time to menopause can only help us narrow the window to a four-year period, which is not clinically useful.

“Women can make better medical decisions with the more complete information offered by new, more sensitive AMH measurements.”

Women are born with all the eggs they will ever have and the supply decreases as menopause approaches.

AMH is produced in the ovaries and controls the development of ovarian follicles from which eggs develop.

According to the researchers, AMH can serve as an indicator of how many eggs a woman has left.

The team analysed blood tests conducted on 1,537 women between the ages of 42 and 63.

Fellow researcher Dr Joel Finkelstein, from Harvard University, said: “Researchers have long thought AMH would be a superior marker of the time to menopause, but tests haven’t been sensitive enough to detect the very, very low levels that occur in the year or two leading up to menopause.

“It took a cohort like the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation, which followed the same women year after year from well before menopause until well after, to get the kind of data necessary to be able to demonstrate the predictive value of AMH.”

The study is published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

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