🗣️ News From The Menopause Society Meeting

Whew. Last week was the annual scientific meeting of The Menopause Society, which is 5 (or even 6 if you go to the pre-meeting sessions) jam-packed, 10-hour days of speakers, sessions, exhibits, and more. I did a handful of live from the show updates you can check out here, here, and here. 

This week, I thought I’d devote the newsletter to bringing you some more highlights from the show, which was by far the biggest meeting the Society has ever hosted. The menopause movement is most definitely going strong and picking up momentum. Without further ado…

🚨 Breaking News

The big news of the meeting came on Friday when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Lynkuet (elinzanetant) for the treatment of moderate to severe menopausal hot flashes. Like Veozah (fezolinetant), Lynkuet works by targeting KNDy receptors in the brain’s temperature control center. Unlike Veozah, which targets just NK-3 receptors, Lynkuet targets both NK1 and NK3 receptors, which appears to also give the new drug benefits for sleep quality. It also appears to have a favorable liver safety profile. Folks were pretty excited about it at the meeting. 

🤯 Coolest Sh*t Award

We were treated to a mind-bending lecture by Dr. Doris Taylor, who is truly a pioneer in the field of cardiac regenerative medicine. Taylor basically spent the past 20 years building a human heart. She built a little rat heart the size of a grape, and then kept scaling up till she made one fit for humans. Now they can create personalized hearts by infusing the scaffolding of a pig’s heart with a person's own stem cells. She said they’ll be transplanting these hearts into people within 4 to 6 years and that heart transplant could one day be as common as hip transplant if we plan accordingly. 

You can check out one of her presentations on the topic on YouTube. 

👉 Favorite Quote

“Ovaries are more than egg factories…They are the conductors of the intricate biological symphony in the female body.” -Jennifer Garrison, PhD, assistant professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging

Garrison gave a pretty moving presentation about how our ovaries age faster than our other organs and because they interact with those organs, accelerate our aging at the time of menopause. Understanding ovarian aging could unlock a longer healthspan for women.

😖 Banging My Head Against the Table Moment

There may be no other field where the statement “women are not small men” is more pertinent and important than cardiology. That point was driven home again by human heart architect Dr. Doris Taylor who illustrated that women are being denied potentially beneficial therapies and are given therapies that could potentially be harmful because researchers do not routinely stratify cardiovascular research according to sex—a practice she called “bad science”—because the sex differences really, really matter. 

I almost lost my mom to a massive heart attack because doctors didn’t recognize her early warning signs of fatigue, anxiety, neck and shoulder pain. We need to do better. 

🧐 Notable Findings

💩 Menopause can mess with digestive health. Among nearly 600 women aged 44–73, 94% reported gut symptoms—most often bloating (77%), constipation (54%), stomach pain (50%), and acid reflux (49%) in one study. Eighty-two percent said their issues began or worsened during perimenopause or menopause, yet only 33% had an IBS diagnosis, and over half said symptoms regularly disrupted daily life. Most turned to self-management through diet or stress reduction, while many found medical support lackinga pattern that echoes what we hear every day in our community.

🧠 We need hormone-informed care in brain injury treatment for women. One presentation found that current traumatic brain injury (TBI) assessment tools fail to consider hormone status—a gap that may delay recovery and obscure accurate diagnoses. The research compared existing TBI and menopause symptom questionnaires and found significant overlap in cognitive, sensory, and mood-related symptoms, along with missing indicators of hormonal influence such as hot flashes. The authors say incorporating hormonal factors into TBI assessments could help clinicians better identify risks and tailor treatment for women, especially those navigating the menopause transition. 

💊 A large study of nearly 1.8 million postmenopausal women found that hormone therapy (HT) users had a higher incidence of autoimmune diseases than non-users at 5, 10, and overall postmenopausal periods. The analysis showed increased risks for 15 of 17 autoimmune conditions studied. Lead author Dr. Xuezhi (Daniel) Jiang noted that while the associations were statistically significant, the absolute risk increase was small, and more research is needed to confirm causality. He emphasized that HT remains a safe and effective treatment for menopause symptoms when used appropriately and should be individualized to each woman’s risk profile.

😥 A study of more than 3,800 postmenopausal women compared the effects of oral versus transdermal hormone therapy (HT) on obesity, cardiovascular disease, anxiety, depression, and Alzheimer’s disease. The research found that transdermal HT was linked to a lower incidence of anxiety and depression compared with oral HT, while no significant differences emerged between the two routes in risks for obesity, cardiovascular disease, or Alzheimer’s. Lead author Liying Wei of Drexel University College of Medicine noted that these findings could help guide more individualized approaches to menopause care.

👀 Dry eyes are more common. A cross-sectional study of more than 3,500 women (mean age 52) found that dry eye disease (DED)—a condition of insufficient or rapidly evaporating tears—was more prevalent in menopausal women (57%) than in premenopausal women (53%). Lead author Debora Yankelevich of Hospital de Clínicas José de San Martín in Buenos Aires emphasized that clinicians should routinely screen for dry eye disease in women, as it remains a common yet often overlooked condition in midlife care.

Check out the blog and podcast I did on it here for more on what to do!

😶‍🌫️ A review from the BRAVE Lab at Ponce Health Sciences University showed that menopause brings real, measurable changes in the brain. Multiple studies have documented a loss of gray matter—the brain tissue involved in memory and thinking—in areas like the frontal and temporal lobes and the hippocampus. Women going through menopause also tend to have more white matter “bright spots” on brain scans, which are signs of small areas of reduced blood flow and have been linked to problems like memory lapses, balance issues, and a higher risk of stroke or dementia. Some studies suggest that gray matter volume can partially recover after menopause, showing the brain’s ability to adapt. Changes in estrogen activity, blood flow, and energy use in the brain may all play a role in these shifts, helping explain why some women notice cognitive and mood changes during the menopause transition.

🗣️ Sound Bites

Reducing variability in sleep timing even without changing sleep duration may reduce adiposity and inflammation in women. ~Brooke Aggarwal, EdD, MS, who noted that when it comes to mitigating the menopause-related metabolic and body composition changes, a stable sleep schedule can help.

The only exercise that truly makes bone density change is very high intensity resistance training. ~Michael R. McClung, MD, noting that weighted vests aren’t going to build bone density and the only exercise he sees that makes a change (which he considers a small effect) is very high intensity resistance training as shown in the LIFTMOR study. 

70% of women with VMS [vasomotor symptoms: hot flashes and night sweats] remain untreated. ~Risa Kagan, MD, noting that even with all the attention being paid to menopause right now, most women are still not getting the care they should.