Perimenopausal symptoms linked to worse CV health metrics

Key takeaways:

• Worse overall menopause-specific quality of life domain scores were significantly linked to poorer CV health metrics.
• Prevalence of poor CV health metrics showed increasing trends with symptom severity.

Among premenopausal Korean women, those reporting more bothersome perimenopausal symptoms had significantly higher prevalence of poor CV health metrics compared with women without symptoms, researchers reported.

“By figuring out which aspects of menopausal symptoms are mostly associated with CV health, we can help target women with specific symptoms at high risk of cardiovascular disease,” Hye Rin Choi, MPH, PhD, from the Center for Cohort Studies at the Total Healthcare Center at Kangbuk Samsung Hospital and the Institute of Medical Research at the Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine in Seoul, South Korea, and colleagues wrote in Menopause. “Therefore, we investigated the association of vasomotor and other menopause symptoms with the ideal CV health metrics among premenopausal stage, Korean women.”

Choi and colleagues conducted a cross-sectional study of 4,611 premenopausal women aged 42 to 52 years (mean age, 45 years). Researchers collected CV health metrics during health screening examinations and assessed perimenopause symptoms using the Korean version of the Menopause-Specific Quality of Life questionnaire. Researchers defined ideal CV health metrics according to the American Heart Association’s Life’s Simple 7 metrics and scored participants’ metrics from unhealthy to healthy and classified them as poor, intermediate or ideal.

Participants were categorized into no symptoms (n = 142) or symptomatic groups that were categorized further into groups based on the Menopause-Specific Quality of Life questionnaire scores: less than 0.9 (n = 1,494), 0.9 to less than 1.9 (n = 1,486) and at least 1.9 (n = 1,489).

The most prevalent vasomotor symptoms were sweating (22.3%) and hot flashes (18.8%), the most prevalent psychosocial symptom was poor memory (71.9%), the most prevalent physical symptom was feeling tired or worn out (78%), and the most prevalent sexual symptoms were vaginal dryness during intercourse (47.1%) and avoiding intimacy (45.6%).

Worse overall menopause-specific quality of life domain scores were all significantly associated with poorer CV health metric scores. When adjusting for age, parity, education level, anti-Müllerian hormone levels and alcohol intake, researchers observed significantly higher prevalence of poor CV health metrics among women with the most bothersome degree for vasomotor (prevalence ratio [PR] = 2.9; 95% CI, 1.95-4.31), psychosocial (PR = 2.07; 95% CI, 1.36-3.15), physical (PR = 3.01; 95% CI, 1.19-7.65) and sexual (PR = 1.66; 95% CI, 1.15-2.39) symptoms vs. women without menopausal symptoms.

In addition, there were significantly increasing trends of poor CV health metrics prevalence with increasing menopausal symptom severity in all domains (P < .05). However, vasomotor symptoms had the highest association with poor CV health metrics.

“Further research is required to confirm the role of menopausal symptoms in CVD risk and demonstrate that the management strategies targeted for menopause symptoms of premenopausal and middle-aged women of diverse ethnicities can improve CV health and subsequent CVD complications,” the researchers wrote.