An Investigation into the Natural History of the Perimenopause in a Sample of American Women

New Mexico State University, Las Cruces NM

Investigators

Abstract

Anthropologists have long been interested in the life histories of women as they are embedded in culture and in understanding the social and biological processes underlying lifespan transitions such as puberty, birth, and menopause. The goal of this project is to better understand the natural history and daily experiences of the menopause transition in contemporary American women. Between 1992 and 1998, 59 women, aged 45 to 50 at entry into the study, kept records of biological, psychological, and social events and experiences for one to five years. Unlike most previous studies of the perimenopause, which were cross-sectional or relied upon infrequent contact and relatively few measurements, the present study used daily checklists of events (e.g., stressors, exercise, sexual experiences, physical symptoms) and mood ratings, along with standardized psychosocial questionnaires and personal narratives, to obtain a full description of the experience and meaning of the menopause transition. This fine-grained information will allow the exploration of changes, processes, and interrelationships among factors that vary on a daily or weekly time scale, as well as the examination of processes that take place over time periods up to several years in length. In previous studies, the authors have demonstrated that a rich view into the lives of individual women can be obtained through the use of daily recording of selected variables. This is the next best thing to becoming participant observers in the classic anthropological sense by immersion in the experiences of each of the women whose lives are being followed. Information collected as part of this study includes over five million data points from the daily checklists in addition to extensive narrative descriptions of significant life events. Funding will allow analysis of these data using appropriate quantitative and qualitative techniques.