"Kids! I'm not ready for that
commitment just yet," admits Kailie Cruz, a law student.
"Granny may have started having kids when she was in her
early twenties, but women nowadays are waiting longer,"
adds the attractive 32-year-old. Kailie, like a lot of
women her age, are waiting to finish their education and
start a career before having kids. But this strategy could
prove to be a dangerous gamble. Inevitably some find out
they've waited too long. Menopause can hit as early as
age 42, and its onset has traditionally been seen as unpredictable,
but research in the July edition of Human Reproduction
outlines a simple method for predicting the fertile years
left to a premenopausal woman, using nothing more invasive
than ultrasound.
The researchers predict their technique,
"will revolutionize the management of women requesting
assisted conception, those who have had treatment for
childhood cancer and those who are considering delaying
a family for personal or professional reasons."
All women carry a fixed number
of primordial follicles, or immature eggs, and this
supply dwindles over the course of a lifetime. This
decline is matched by a shrinking of the ovaries. So,
the number of eggs remaining correlates to ovarian size.
The researchers found the rate
of decline varies little from one woman to another.
Rather, variance in menopausal age can be explained
by wide differences in the number of follicles present
at birth. They believe that women whose ovaries are
larger than average for their age, as measured by transvaginal
ultrasonography, will hit menopause later, while those
with smaller- than-average ovaries have fewer reproductive
years left. They plan to conduct a prospective trial
to test this hypothesis.
Announcing the findings, Dr Hamish
Wallace, of the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in
Edinburgh, Scotland, said the research opened the door
to the possibility of screening women to see if they
were likely to face an early menopause: "There is currently
no reliable test of ovarian reserve for an individual
woman that will predict accurately her remaining reproductive
lifespan."
He said the ultrasound test "may
allow us to predict for a woman, aged 25-50, what ovarian
reserves she has and at what age she is likely to experience
the menopause. In essence, it means we now have the
potential to be able to tell a woman how fast her biological
clock is ticking and how much time she has before it
will run down."
|
