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. 2014 Mar;122(3):229-34.
doi: 10.1289/ehp.1206399. Epub 2014 Jan 7.

Cumulative lead exposure and age at menopause in the Nurses' Health Study cohort

Ki-Do Eum  1 , Marc G Weisskopf, Linda H Nie, Howard Hu, Susan A Korrick
Affiliations

Cumulative lead exposure and age at menopause in the Nurses' Health Study cohort

Ki-Do Eum et al. Environ Health Perspect. 2014 Mar.

Abstract

Background: Early menopause has been associated with many adverse health outcomes, including increased risk of cardiovascular disease morbidity and mortality. Lead has been found to be adversely associated with female reproductive function, but whether exposures experienced by the general population are associated with altered age at menopause has not been explored.

Objective: Our goal was to assess the association between cumulative lead exposure and age at natural menopause.

Methods: Self-reported menopausal status and bone lead concentration measured with K-shell X-ray fluorescence-a biomarker of cumulative lead exposure-were obtained from 434 women participants in the Nurses' Health Study.

Results: The mean (± SD) age at natural menopause was 50.8 ± 3.6 years. Higher tibia lead level was associated with younger age at menopause. In adjusted analyses, the average age of menopause for women in the highest tertile of tibia lead was 1.21 years younger (95% CI: -2.08, -0.35) than for women in the lowest tertile (p-trend = 0.006). Although the number of cases was small (n = 23), the odds ratio for early menopause (< 45 years of age) was 5.30 (95% CI: 1.42, 19.78) for women in the highest tertile of tibia lead compared with those in the lowest tertile (p-trend = 0.006). There was no association between patella or blood lead and age at menopause.

Conclusions: Our results support an association between low-level cumulative lead exposure and an earlier age at menopause. These data suggest that low-level lead exposure may contribute to menopause-related health outcomes in older women through effects on age at menopause.

Citation: Eum KD, Weisskopf MG, Nie LH, Hu H, Korrick SA. 2014. Cumulative lead exposure and age at menopause in the Nurses' Health Study Cohort. Environ Health Perspect 122:229–234; http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1206399

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Conflict of interest statement

The study’s funding organizations had no role in study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the report.

The authors declare they have no actual or potential competing financial interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Smoothed (natural spline, 3 knots) association between tibia lead concentration and age at menopause, adjusted for substudy group, age at bone lead measurement, age at bone lead measurement squared, year of birth, age at menarche, months of oral contraceptive use, parity, and pack-years of smoking. The stippled lines indicate the 95% CIs. Short vertical lines on the x-axis represent individual women in the study.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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