Anyone with ovaries who lives long enough will experience menopause. While menopause is a natural transition in midlife, it can strongly affect a person’s quality of life and their current and future risk of heart disease, osteoporosis and other issues. So you might think that whether someone is experiencing or has gone through menopause would be noted in their medical records.
But when we and our colleagues examined the electronic medical records of almost 240,000 women, only 12% included mention of menopause, even though more than half the women reported separately that they were experiencing this transition. Our findings, published in the journal Menopause, reveal a major gap in how clinicians capture basic information about women’s health.
