Reproductive factors and cardiovascular health in post-menopausal women: a special focus on natural menopause

ABSTRACT

Female-specific reproductive factors might contribute to increased risk of cardiovascular disease, and the American Heart Association (AHA) recently proposed Life’s Essential 8 (LE8) score to quantify cardiovascular health (CVH). The study aimed to examine the relationships between reproductive factors and the LE8 score among post-menopause women in the United States. We enrolled 3223 post-menopause women from National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). CVH groups based on LE8 score were low (0–49), moderate (50–79), and high good CVH levels (80–100). Multivariate ordinal logistic regressions were applied to estimate the associations between reproductive factors and the LE8 score. In multivariate model, early menarche (OR: 0.69, 95 percent CI: 0.51–0.93) and early menopause (OR: 0.57, 95 percent CI: 0.43–0.77) were associated with LE8 score compared with normal menarche and menopause; Meanwhile, ages at menarche and menopause were positively correlated with LE8 score. The number of pregnancies and full-term pregnancies were negatively associated with LE8 (OR for per pregnancy increase and 95 percent CI, 0.93 (0.88, 0.98), 0.93 (0.87, 0.99), separately). Overall, natural menopausal women with early age at menarche and menopause, and a higher number of pregnancies may have a high risk of lower CVH, and need to focus on their CVH.

KEYWORDS:

• Cardiovascular health
• Life’s Essential 8
• natural menopause
• post-menopause women
• reproductive factors

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

Xiaoting Fan and Yuan Zhang: Data curation, Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Validation, Writing – Original draft preparation, Writing – review & editing. Ning Ning, Yingxin Wang and Yue He: Data curation, Writing – Review & Editing, Investigation. Yanan Ma and Lina Jin: Writing – Review & Editing, Supervision, Conceptualization, Project administration. Xiaoting Fan and Yuan Zhang contributed equally as co-first authors.

Data sharing statement

Data used in the present study, and corresponding data collection protocols, are freely available on https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes/index.htm.

Ethics statement

Ethical approval for conducting the NHANES 2007–2018 was granted by the NHANES Institutional Review Board (Protocol #2005–06, #2011–17, and #2018–01). The study procedures followed the Declaration of Helsinki, and each participant completed written informed consent.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/03630242.2024.2349572

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Science and Technology Department of Jilin Province, China [grant number: 20240101308JC]. The funders had no role in the design neither of the study nor in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data or in writing the manuscript.