Dr. Jocelyn Wittstein

Yeah.

You know, musculoskeletal

effects of menopause are multiple and some are more silent than others.

So, you know, more accelerated loss of bone density, increased joint inflammation and risk of arthritis.

Women over 50 or 35 percent more likely to have arthritis than men.

And that difference doesn't equilibrate until age 80.

So that is a disparate aging of joints.

Right.

And so that's just not normal aging.

Well, I guess it is normal aging for women because women do normally go through menopause, but I'm saying it is probably a modifiable thing, right?

Right.

As is osteoporosis.

Yeah.

And then getting back to the mouse versus human situation, you know, we talk about muscle mass and maintenance of muscle mass.

As we age, both men and women do lose muscle mass.

Now, there are some studies that show that men and women don't have different rates of muscle mass loss over 50.

There was a recent systematic review that looked at hormone therapy that included estradiol and showed, like in this meta-analysis, that it didn't actually make a difference in terms of helping women maintain muscle mass.

On the other hand, some of these studies use like older forms and older ways of assessing for sarcopenia.

Right.

And then there are some new studies coming out that I read one recently out of Thailand where there was a positive effect of hormone therapy with estradiol on muscle mass.