From the Editor

Menopause signals a time in a woman’s life when she experiences the natural cessation of menstruation due to hormonal changes. These biological changes are not only accompanied by a decline in reproductive abilities but also physical changes that may affect mood, health, and sexual functioning. The topic of menopause is widely researched, and this makes sense given its universal impact on women. However, more studies are needed to understand the differential impact on women from other cultures and the contribution of environmental factors on women’s experiences. This issue of the journal includes featured articles on menopause that examine menopause in specific cultural contexts and consider its adverse impact on women.

Our authors’ work gives us access to the experiences of women from different cultures—Iran, Puerto Rico, and Costa Rica. In Iran, the law requires women to wear headscarves, and like this covering, issues relevant to Iranian women may not be as visible. Similarly, in other cultures women’s experiences around the issue of menopause and the resulting effects may be shrouded. This issue takes up the important task of generating knowledge about cultural perspectives on aspects of menopause, including: the onset of menopause (“Childhood Disadvantages and the Timing of the Onset of Natural Menopause in Latin America and the Caribbean”); its impact of sexual functioning (“Quality of Life and Sexual Function in Postmenopausal Women”); and on women’s emotional well-being (“The Effectiveness of a Group-Based Educational Program on the Self-Efficacy and Self-Acceptance of Menopausal Women: A Randomized Controlled Trial”).

I applaud the diversity of research approaches and measures this issue employs in its attention to an experience central to most women—cross-sectional, randomized control trial; the PRECEDE-PROCEED model; and the Cox proportional hazard model. For emerging and more established researchers interested in exploring the experiences of aging women, this issue provides a rich collection of research measures, such as The Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI) questionnaire and a quality of life measure such as the WHO Quality of Life–BREF.

As stated earlier, menopause has an adverse impact on women’s physical and emotional well-being. One consistent recommendation for women experiencing menopause is for them to have an active life, engaging in regular exercise. We learn about the exercise tendencies of postmenopausal women from one of our articles, “Differences in Fitness Level Between Women Aged 60 and Over Participating in Three Different Supervised Exercise Programs and a Sedentary Group.” Our final article provides us with a model for engaging older Asian women from South Korea through collaborations with NGOs.

I continue to value the contributions of our authors to our journal. Contributions extend beyond content expertise to include excellent representations of scholarly work in the area of aging women.