Chinese experts have discovered that women who go through menopause before the normal age have a higher risk of dementia than other women.
It should be noted that the average global age of onset of menopause in women is around 50 years, however, many women experience menopause earlier and later.
Premature onset of menopause is not considered good from a women's health perspective.
Wanting Hao of Shandong University in Jinan, China, and colleagues analyzed the health information of more than 1.5 million women collected from 2006 to 2010 in an open-source database called UK Biobank.
A careful analysis of this data found that women who started menopause before the age of 40 had a 35% higher risk of dementia in old age than women who started menopause at an average age.
Similarly, women who started menopause before age 45 had a 1.3-fold (130 percent) higher risk of dementia at age 65 than normal women.
However, the risk of dementia in women with menopause onset at age 52 or older was about the same as for women with menopause onset at 50 to 51 years.
After the onset of menopause, the risk of stroke increases in women. Based on the fact that blood supply to the brain is affected in strokes, experts believed that these women would also be at a higher risk of dementia.
However, the new research did not prove a correlation between dementia, stroke, and dementia.