Defining menopause status: creation of a new definition to identify the early changes of the menopausal transition.

Objective: Several menopausal staging definitions are currently being used in ongoing studies designed to identify changes occurring during menopause. The objective of this study was to determine which definition captures the earliest hormonal changes in the menopausal transition.

Design: In this prospective cohort study, women aged 35 to 47 years were followed for 5 years.

Tubal ligation does not affect hormonal changes during the early menopausal transition.

Background: To determine if women with a bilateral tubal ligation (BTL) were more likely to experience hormonal changes indicative of the transition to menopause or an increase in menopausal symptoms compared to women without a BTL.

Methods: Menopausal symptoms and hormone profiles of 134 women reporting a BTL were compared throughout the course of a 4-year follow-up study to 172 women without a BTL. Generalized linear regression models for repeated measures were used to estimate the independent effect of BTL on menopausal symptoms and hormonal levels adjusted for covariates.

Predicting participation in prospective studies of ovarian aging.

Objective: Identifying clinical markers and characteristics of the transition to menopause is an important woman's health issue, and recent long-term, prospective, cohort studies are just beginning to offer insight into methods of predicting the transition to menopause. One of the major challenges of conducting prospective cohort studies is the problem of attrition-both the retention of study participants and the influence of dropouts on the final study results. We conducted this systematic analysis to: 1) identify baseline predictors of subsequent long-term participation, and 2) determine the demographic, psychosocial, and hormonal differences between participants and dropouts among a group of premenopausal women enrolled in a longitudinal study of ovarian aging.