Pregnancy and birth history influence women's experience of menopause

Abstract

The determinants of experiencing menopausal symptoms are complex, representing biological, psychological, and social factors. We report the impact of one such factor, fertility, on the experience of menopausal symptoms. We hypothesize that nulliparous women will have more dissatisfaction with childbearing choices and more negative attitudes toward menopause but will experience fewer menopausal symptoms. Women aged 40 to 65 years were recruited from a single internal medicine practice to participate in a 5-year longitudinal study of the impact of menopause on health-related quality of life. Women completed questionnaires including the RAND-36, attitudes toward menopause, menopausal symptoms, and fertility and childbearing. Based on self-reported pregnancy and birth history, we categorized women as parous (one or more live births), nulligravida (no pregnancies or births), and nulliparous (one or more pregnancies and no live births). Categorical variables were analyzed using univariable and multivariable ordered logistic and logistic regression. Continuous variables were analyzed using Student's t test and multivariable linear regression techniques. The 728 participants were, on average, 50.8 years old with 2.4 pregnancies and 1.7 live births. Compared with parous women, nulligravida and nulliparous women were more likely to report being very dissatisfied with childbearing choices (odds ratio [OR] [95% CI]: 3.3 [2.3-4.6] and 4.0 [2.5-6.4], respectively). Nulliparous, but not nulligravida, women expressed more negative attitudes toward menopause compared with parous women (P<0.001). Nulligravida and nulliparous women were half as likely to report hot flashes as parous women (OR [95% CI]: 0.6 [0.4-0.9] and 0.5 [0.3-0.9], respectively). Compared with parous women, nulligravida women were less likely to report vaginal dryness (OR [95% CI]: 0.5 [0.3-0.7]). Our study examined the impact of pregnancy and birth history on menopausal symptoms, and the findings support the hypothesis that women who experience infertility may find menopause to be a time of normalcy and experience fewer hot flashes. Both physiologic and psychosocial mechanisms deserve further study.