Word: disseldorp
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...Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, they report that a simple blood test, for a hormone called anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH), could help women predict when they will enter menopause, and therefore how to set their fertility timetable. "Predicting menopause itself might not be that interesting," admits Dr. Jeroen van Disseldorp, lead author of the study and a fertility specialist at University Medical Center Utrecht. "But menopause is associated with fertility. So, predicting menopause might become more and more important in the future as women continue to delay childbearing...
Measuring AMH, says van Disseldorp, is potentially much more accurate. In his study, he included 144 women aged 25 to 46 in order set baseline levels of AMH, and then compared these levels to those of over 3,000 women aged 58 to 70 who had undergone menopause. By creating a regression curve, he determined a cutoff level of AMH that triggered menopause, and by placing the young women along this curve based on their AMH levels, could predict when they would hit the Change - and how many more years of fertility they could expect...
...Disseldorp acknowledges that the precise AMH level for menopause may differ among populations, and thus anticipates that additional studies like his will need to both verify his finding and perhaps establish other cutoff levels for women of different racial and ethnic backgrounds...
Some IVF clinics are already using AMH as an indicator of a woman's child-bearing potential, and cancer doctors look to AMH levels in ovarian cancer patients to determine whether chemotherapy has affected their fertility. So far, van Disseldorp thinks the test will be especially effective in women over 30, when AMH levels begin to decline naturally. After all, when it comes to a clock, even a biological one, wouldn't you want it to be as accurate as possible...
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