Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Women's reproductive health includes several important events across the lifespan, from one's first menstrual period to menopause. Some research has investigated how individual reproductive events, like having a pregnancy, might be linked with developing a disease later in life. However, we don't know how the combination of reproductive health events, like age at first period, having a pregnancy, and age at menopause, might impact developing a disease later in life. The goal of this presentation is to identify patterns of reproductive health history across the life course among postmenopausal women. To do this, we analyzed data from the Women's Health Initiative (WHI). We were interested in how age at one's first period, age at menopause, menstrual regularity, pregnancy, hormone use, and surgical menopause were related. We found three meaningful patterns of reproductive health history that were distinguished by age at first menstrual period and hormone use. In the future, these patterns may be helpful in a clinical and public health setting, where these "profiles" of reproductive health history can be used to identify individuals at increased risk of chronic disease in later life. Future research that helps us increase our understanding of how sex-specific reproductive health history factors, like menstruation and menopause, is important to prevent disease and promote health among older women.