Highlights
- •Menopause and related changes may be associated with frailty.
- •Later age at menopause is associated with decreased risk of prevalent frailty.
- •Hormonal changes after menopause may be related to this association.
Abstract
Menopause and related changes may be associated with frailty and contribute to higher
frailty risk. This systematic review of the literature on the association between
menopause and frailty combines the findings from studies of community-dwelling women.
PubMed was systematically searched in March 2021 with a time frame from 2000 to March
2021 without language restriction. Potentially eligible studies were those that provided
cross-sectional or prospective observational data on associations between menopause
and frailty in community-dwelling women. Reference lists of relevant articles and
the included studies were reviewed for additional studies. The same effect sizes were
combined using a meta-analysis using the generic inverse variance method. From 131
studies identified, cross-sectional data on age at menopause from 3 studies and longitudinal
data on surgical menopause from 2 studies were used for meta-analysis. Each one-year
increase in age at menopause was significantly associated with a 2 % decreased risk
of prevalent frailty (pooled odds ratio = 0.98, 95%CI (confidence interval) = 0.96–0.99,
p < 0.001). Surgical menopause did not predict incident frailty (pooled OR = 1.02,
95%CI = 0.82–1.28, p = 0.23). This systematic review and meta-analysis showed that
later age at menopause was significantly associated with a lower risk of prevalent
frailty. In a clinical setting, age at menopause can be useful information to help
clinicians to evaluate and stratify frailty risk in postmenopausal women. Hormonal
changes after menopause may be related to the link between age at menopause and frailty
and thus warrant further investigation.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: August 01, 2022
Accepted:
July 16,
2022
Received in revised form:
June 27,
2022
Received:
November 22,
2021
Identification
Copyright
© 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
