It’s not called “The Big Change” for nothing.
When menopause strikes, changes come in many shapes and forms, both surprising — how our voices sound — to unsurprising, like how the ovaries work.
But new research has found the reproductive system goes through a surprising change that’s detrimental to women’s health in the long run.
Menopause is marked as the moment when the ovaries stop producing eggs for 12 consecutive months, prompting researchers to believe this meant the system just shut down completely.
Instead, a study published in Molecular Human Reproduction found that rather than retiring, the ovaries undergo a career change of sorts.
Looking at the ovaries of mice, the researchers found that as they aged, the reproductive glands became filled with immune cells that produced pro-inflammatory signals.
However, this could mean bad news for aging bodies, as low-grade chronic inflammation is linked to age-related diseases, as it damages tissue over time.
Even after they’ve stopped producing eggs, the ovaries don’t stop working and instead shift to take on the role of an immune-like inflammatory organ.
They also show increased production of various immune cells, and undergo “inflammaging,” or the long-term inflammation that develops with old age.
Inflammation is good for us — to a certain extent.
“In a healthy situation, your immune system fights off the infection, eliminates the cancer cells, and the job is done,” Dr. Brian Brown, director of the Icahn Genomics Institute at Mount Sinai in Manhattan, previously told The Post. “And then it shuts itself off.”
But unlike acute inflammation that develops over a cut, the persistent immune response can be an underlying factor in several age-related conditions like cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, arthritis and type 2 diabetes.
Inflammaging also explains why cancer diagnoses drastically increase after the half-century mark, with 90% of cancers coming up after age 50.
White blood cells keep churning out cytokines, which leads to a constant state of inflammation, making it more difficult for the immune system to detect and attack cancer cells.
And inflammation changes as we age.
“Particularly after the age of 40, our bodies have more difficulty dampening down the inflammation,” Brown said.
While the ovarian study was conducted on mice, which don’t mimic the human body, there’s a similar evolutionary history that can offer hints and evidence of what goes on.
The findings of the study are a breakthrough for post-reproductive women or those who have had their ovaries removed, however it also brings about questions for healthcare in aging women.
“These findings challenge the assumption that the post-reproductive ovary is inert, instead indicating that it acquires an immune identity with potential endocrine and paracrine influence on whole-body aging,” study lead Francesca Duncan said.
