All Things Breastfeeding Episode 92: Menopause and Nursing

Nancy and Barbara discuss a new article that came out in 2024. The study was a large study (20,000 women) in Canada and it looked at the length of breastfeeding, overall years/months of breastfeeding and the onset of menopause. Breastfeeding and women are the terms used in the study so we will be using them here and in the podcast to reflect accurately how the authors used these terms. As we age, this becomes more important to us! They looked at different lengths of breastfeeding. We discuss the study and what does the term “menopause” mean. “We analyzed survey data on 19,783 parous women aged 40 to 65 years at enrollment in the Alberta’s Tomorrow Project (2000–2022), a prospective community-based cohort study in Alberta, Canada. Duration of lifetime lactation across all births was categorized as: <1 month (reference group; 19.8% of women), 1–3 months (12.1%), 4–6 months (11.7%), 7–12 months (18.8%), and ??13 months (37.7%). Women were classified as premenopause, natural menopause (age at 1 year after the final menstrual period), surgical menopause (age at bilateral oophorectomy), or indeterminate menopause (age at premenopausal hysterectomy with ovarian preservation).” The results: “In a dose-response manner, longer lactation was associated with reduced risk of natural menopause before age 50 (for ??13 months of lactation, adjusted hazard ratio at age 45: 0.68, 95% CI 0.59–0.78), surgical menopause before age 55 (age 45: 0.56, 0.50–0.63), and indeterminate menopause before age 50 (age 45: 0.75, 0.69–0.82). Longer lactation was associated with lower odds of surgical (adjusted odds ratio 0.54, 95% CI 0.45–0.66) and indeterminate menopause (0.63, 0.55–0.73), compared to natural menopause.” So interesting! Just another reason for us to nurse! The post All Things Breastfeeding Episode 92: Menopause and Nursing appeared first on The Breastfeeding Center of Ann Arbor .

You can listen to All Things Breastfeeding Episode 92: Menopause and Nursing online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

All Things Breastfeeding Episode 92: Menopause and Nursing is an episode from All Things Breastfeeding Podcast by Barbara D. Robertson, IBCLC; Barbara Demske RN, BSN.

This episode is 11:49 long.

This episode was published on Jan 15, 2025.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from All Things Breastfeeding Podcast when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.