menopause news, articles and features | New Scientist

How menopause radically changes the brain – and what happens after

Grace Wade — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 15:00:05 +0000

The brain undergoes a full renovation during menopause. Although these changes are profound, we’re learning that the long-term impact needn’t be all bad

At-home hypnosis relieves menopausal hot flushes

Christa Lesté-Lasserre — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 17:25:39 +0000

Hot flushes are a very common symptom around the time of the menopause

Chay_Tee/Shutterstock

The frequency and severity of menopausal hot flushes could be more than halved through the use of hypnotic audio recordings, which can be listened to from the comfort of home.

Up to 80 per cent of women – sudden feelings of overheating that can cause excess sweating, discomfort, anxiety and sleep disturbances – due to the dramatic drop in oestrogen around this time. Dietary changes, hormone replacement therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can help, but these are often inconvenient and don’t work for everyone.

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Everything is perimenopause now – but what if it’s not?

“Many people believe there’s a mind-body connection, and that through mental processes, we can influence our bodies and our physiology,” says at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. “This demonstration of hypnotherapy shows just how strong and powerful that mind-body connection is.”

Hypnosis administered in a clinic has been shown to improve hot flush symptoms, , but people need a more convenient option, says Elkins. Now, he and his colleagues have developed a six-week home programme that involves listening to 20-minute vocal recordings every day that aim to induce hypnotic relaxation and provoke images of coolness.

To put it to the test, they asked 250 postmenopausal women, average age 56, who experienced at least four hot flushes a day to complete either their hypnosis programme or a sham one that provides 20 minutes of white noise.

Six weeks later, those in the hypnosis group reported hot flush scores – a measure of their frequency and severity – that were 53 per cent lower, on average, than at the start. Those in the sham group also benefited from their programme, but to a lesser extent, with a 41 per cent reduction. That’s probably due to the placebo effect, says Elkins.

After 12 weeks, when the intervention period had ended, both groups continued to experience improvements from their starting scores, with the hypnosis one reporting an overall score improvement of 61 per cent. This is compared to an overall 44 per cent improvement in the sham group at 12 weeks. The women may have been continuing to listen to the recordings voluntarily or doing their own hypnosis based on what they had learned, says Elkins.

This supports at-home hypnosis as a convenient, low-cost – or free – intervention for hot flushes around the time of the menopause, he says. How exactly it works is unclear, but research suggests that it enables the brain to modify its connections and rewire itself, which may help us face the variety of experiences life throws at us. This may also explain why hypnosis is often effective at easing pain and anxiety.

Journal reference:

JAMA Network Open

Testosterone helps libido in menopause – can it treat other symptoms?

Grace Wade — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 17:17:09 +0000

A growing body of research suggests testosterone replacement therapy can alleviate menopausal symptoms such as a decrease in libido, mood swings and brain fog. But some in the field are sceptical

Starting HRT in early menopause may reduce women’s risk of Alzheimer’s

Grace Wade — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 19:36:30 +0000

Hormone replacement therapy used within five years of the onset of menopause is associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease, while starting it later in life is associated with an increased risk

We’re finally learning how perimenopause profoundly changes the brain

Linda Geddes — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 16:00:35 +0000

The hormonal upheaval in the run-up to menopause can cause cognitive difficulties. But researchers are also finding that this can be a critical window for protecting long-term brain health

Why postmenopausal women are so crucial to our evolutionary success

Alice Klein — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 14:00:00 +0000

Genetic studies suggest postmenopausal women are so important in terms of ensuring the survival of grandchildren that we evolved genes to keep their brains healthy

Most mammals go through the menopause – if they live long enough

Michael Le Page — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 15:00:17 +0000

Sperm whales are among the few mammal species that are widely considered to undergo menopause

Nature Picture Library/Alamy

Only humans and a few toothed whales undergo the menopause, many sources will tell you. But a paper by Ivana Winkler and at the German Cancer Research Center claims that the menopause is, in fact, widespread among mammals. So which is right? The surprising answer is both. Goncalves studies how the female reproductive tract ages in mice. “It’s absolutely clear that our mice in captivity reach something that is like menopause in humans,” she says. “And yet every time that I present this work to an audience, I get the question, ‘but I thought only humans had a menopause?'” So Goncalves and Winkler set out to establish which other mammals have a menopause by reviewing published studies. The first issue is that most other mammals do not menstruate in the sense of bleeding when the lining of the uterus is shed. Instead, the lining of the uterus is reabsorbed. If you define the menopause in the narrow sense of the ending of menstruation, most mammals cannot undergo it because they do not menstruate to begin with. However, biologists generally use the term in a wider sense. “The term is used in the literature to mean cessation of reproduction, and does not depend on menstruation,” says at the University of Turku in Finland. The key physical thing that results from the menopause is the ovaries stop releasing eggs – the oopause. But finding out if and when most mammals undergo oopause is far from easy. In some species, the presence or absence of reproductive cycles can be directly established by, for instance, looking at hormone levels in blood. But scientists can usually only do such studies in captive animals. And for most species, researchers have to infer the timing of the oopause from when individuals cease reproducing, which is also typically gleaned from animals in captivity. In their analysis, Winkler and Goncalves looked at studies that included at least 10 captive individuals. While they found reliable studies for less than 100 species, the results showed that the vast majority of these mammals stopped producing eggs if they lived long enough. In fact, female mammals typically underwent the oopause when they were between one-third and two-thirds of the way through their maximum possible lifespan. “This shows that the [female] reproductive system stops working much earlier than the rest of the body,” Goncalves says. “And for me, it’s absolutely relevant that this happens in other species as well.” Previous studies have suggested this is the case, Goncalves says, but theirs is the most comprehensive and rigorous analysis so far. If the menopause is defined as animals undergoing an oopause when they live to a relatively old age rather than being killed by predators or disease, then Goncalves’s study provides good evidence that the menopause is common in many mammals. But she is not claiming that most wild females survive long enough to undergo the oopause. “It’s not about what’s happening in the wild,” Goncalves says. And what happens in the wild matters from an evolutionary perspective, she says.

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Female Asian elephants mysteriously stop reproducing later in life

“This paper shows nicely that if you’re kept safe from the dangers of the world, eventually you’ll run out of eggs,” says at the University of Exeter in the UK. In 2017, his team showed that, in the wild, females from a few species of toothed whale regularly . His study is the main source for the claim that the menopause occurs only in humans and a handful of whales. But Ellis agrees it depends on which definition you use. “I deliberately focused on wild populations, and they’ve deliberately focused on captive populations,” he says. “I think both are equally valid. It depends on the kind of question you’re trying to ask.” Coincidentally, a separate study published the same day described . There have been occasional reports of individual chimps surviving well past the age they can reproduce. But in one group in the Kibale National Park in Uganda that has been studied for more than 20 years, more than a third of females have been surviving past this point. However, this particular group has managed to expand its territory – meaning plenty of food – in a region when human hunters have wiped out predators such as leopards. So the observation may be a temporary result of unusually favourable circumstances, rather than the norm, the researchers say. If so, it fits in neatly with both Goncalves’s and Ellis’s findings. What is clear is that females in the majority of mammal species stop producing eggs long before the end of their maximum potential lifespans, but in the wild few reach this point. Whether this means the menopause is common or rare comes down to how you define it.

Journal reference

Cell

Outdated research on HRT is letting people down

Legacy content author — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 18:00:00 +0000

It's time to be clear about the evidence around hormone replacement therapy and let people make up their own minds

Should you take HRT? Here’s how to think clearly about the risks

Caroline Williams — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 14:00:11 +0000

Hormone replacement therapy has a bad reputation because of potential risks to long-term health. A new look at the evidence could change our relationship with HRT - and the menopause

Soy-heavy vegan diet may reduce hot flushes in postmenopausal women

Grace Wade — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 18:59:33 +0000

Following a low-fat vegan diet along with eating 86 grams of soybeans daily reduced the frequency of hot flushes by 78 per cent in postmenopausal women