What鈥檚聽the best way to relieve the symptoms of menopause? An artificial ovary may be the answer.
Many women experiencing menopause struggle with weight gain and a loss of bone density. Hormonal replacement therapies can help, but getting the doses wrong can raise the risk of heart disease or breast cancer.
at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina thinks this is because HRT is too simple; it only supplies oestrogen, progesterone or testosterone, or a combination of these. His team has created capsules of ovarian tissue that, once implanted, can supply the聽full range of ovarian hormones.
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The capsules are about half a millimetre wide and are made of layers of ovarian cells that mimic the聽structure of an ovarian follicle. To聽see if they work, the team implanted them into rats that have had their ovaries removed 鈥� a process that mimics menopause.
Removing the ovaries led to a drop in oestrogen and progesterone, but soaring levels of other hormones. Giving rats HRT boosted oestrogen and progesterone, but didn鈥檛 bring these other hormones down. However, rats with a bioengineered follicle had more normal levels across the range of ovarian hormones (Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-01851-3).
This seemed to benefit their health. Both groups of rats gained less fat and lost less bone mass, but the effect was stronger in those given follicles. Opara thinks these results suggest a similar implant could help women.
鈥淭his research is a significant step towards creating a bio-ovary for management of the menopause,鈥� says of Monash University in Australia. But she says it聽may be hard to create capsules that聽suit each woman鈥檚 individual hormone levels.
Women may also be unwilling to undergo surgery.
Read more: How menopause and Alzheimer鈥檚 change the brain in similar ways
This article appears in print under the headline 鈥淏ionic ovary fine-tunes menopause鈥�
