Dr Caoimhe Hartley

And bones obviously would be the other thing.

And God knows what else.

From a cardiovascular, from a blood vessel point of view, oestrogen seems to regulate nitric oxide, which is one of the chemicals that helps your blood vessels expand and contract.

So when you can dilate or expand your blood vessels, your blood pressure decreases.

If you think of like within a pipe and all that, you know, the smaller the pipe, the higher the pressure of liquid running through it.

So you're

vascular system is supposed to be able to like constrict and then dilate depending on whether you're like running up the stairs or lying down in bed or whatever.

And part of how we develop blood pressure is a loss of that flexibility in our blood vessels.

And some of that is mediated by oestrogen.

Some of it is also genetics and aging and cholesterol and other things.

But oestrogen has a role to play there.

So that's kind of interesting.

And I think that's part of why we see this change in our vascular risk when we get to perimenopause and menopause.

Cool, isn't it?

Yeah, I know.

But it happens men too, bear in mind.

So there's definitely aging and genetics and probably environmental or lifestyle factors.

They call it epigenetics at play too.

So it's not all down to the hormonal shift, but it's

We know in women who hit menopause earlier, if you lose your ovarian function, so you lose your oestrogen production at a much younger age, you take a woman, a female population in their 30s, if they lose oestrogen at that point, we know that their cardiovascular risk is much higher than someone the same age still having periods.