Pollution Warms the planet, leads to bad health — and now has been found to affect menopause!
As if the effects of pollution and climate change were not severe enough, here comes more bad news: that the main cause of global warming — bad stuff in the air — exacerbate the effects of menopause.
Yup, scientists have found that the hormone levels and symptoms of women going through the menopause transition and living in polluted areas can be severely affected.
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In a study published in the journal Science of Total Environment, University of Michigan researchers analyzed the sex hormones of 1,365 middle-aged women and the air quality around their homes and found that exposure to two types of air pollutants, nitrogen dioxide and the fine particulate matter known as PM2.5, was associated with an additional decrease in estrogen levels and a more accelerated estrogen decline.
And that can have serious consequences. “Menopause is an important predictor of future chronic disease,” Sung Kyun Park, an associate professor of epidemiology at the university and an author of the study, told Inside Climate News. “The management of menopause is really important to the woman’s health later in life. If air pollution plays a role, we need to take care of that.”
In particular, estrogen decrease has been linked to an increase in the risk of cardiovascular disease, bone health problems and Alzheimer’s disease.
A very important aspect of the study is that, until now, most air pollution research has been done on women of reproductive age, Amelia Wesselink, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Boston University who was not involved in the research, told the outlet.
“What’s really unique about this study is that they have repeated measures of reproductive hormones before, during and after the menopausal transition,” Wesselink added. “All of the symptoms that we associate with menopause are really resulting from these dramatic changes in hormone levels.”
The consequences of pollution seem to never end.
