Title
Prevalence of menopausal symptoms among mid-life women: findings from electronic medical records
UMMS Affiliation
Department of Medicine; Meyers Primary Care Institute
Publication Date
2015-08-13
Document Type
Article
Disciplines
Health Information Technology | Obstetrics and Gynecology | Reproductive and Urinary Physiology | Women's Health
Abstract
BACKGROUND: To assess the prevalence of menopausal symptoms among women prescribed hormone therapy (HT) using electronic medical record data from a regional healthcare organization.
METHODS: Retrospective data from the Reliant Medical Group from 1/1/2006-12/31/2011 were assessed for 102 randomly-selected patients. Study eligibility criteria included: females aged 45 to 65; prescribed oral or transdermal HT; no history of breast cancer, venous thromboembolism, stroke, gynecological cancer, or hysterectomy; continuously enrolled in the health plan for 1 year before and after the first observed HT prescription. Prevalence of menopause-related symptoms was analyzed descriptively at both the patient and visit levels.
RESULTS: Mean age of patients was 54 years. The most common menopausal symptoms were: hot flushes (40%), night sweats (17%), insomnia (16%), vaginal dryness (13%), mood disorders (12%), and weight gain (12%). Among the 102 patients, 163 individual visits listing menopausal symptoms were identified, of which hot flushes (71 visits) were the most common symptom identified.
CONCLUSION: Our findings provide recent data on the types of menopausal symptoms experienced by mid-life women prescribed HT. Electronic medical records may be a rich source of data for future studies of menopausal symptoms in this population.
Rights and Permissions
Copyright © Sussman et al. 2015. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
DOI of Published Version
10.1186/s12905-015-0217-y
Source
BMC Womens Health. 2015 Aug 13;15:58. doi: 10.1186/s12905-015-0217-y. Link to article on publisher's site
Journal/Book/Conference Title
BMC women's health
Related Resources
PubMed ID
26271251
Repository Citation
Sussman M, Trocio J, Best C, Mirkin S, Bushmakin AG, Yood RA, Friedman M, Menzin J, Louie M. (2015). Prevalence of menopausal symptoms among mid-life women: findings from electronic medical records. Open Access Articles. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12905-015-0217-y. Retrieved from https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/oapubs/2623
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Included in
Health Information Technology Commons, Obstetrics and Gynecology Commons, Reproductive and Urinary Physiology Commons, Women's Health Commons