Menopause and Mommies-Come-Lately

Only on a blog for late-in-life moms would I be posting about menopause. Advanced Maternal Age: where motherhood and menopause coincide.
In the Web exclusive article "Biological Alarm Clock," Newsweek reports on how researchers can now predict menopause more accurately--and how this could help women.
According to Newsweek, doctors say too many women assume their biological clock will run full-tilt well into their 40s. Despite medical advances, there is still no good early-warning test to determine exactly when a woman will go through menopause.
Most women go through menopause between the ages of 45 and 55, according to the article, but it can happen anytime between 40 and 60. That's a big span. For women who go through menopause on the early side, finding out that they're not as fertile as they thought they'd be in their late 30s can be a heartbreaking surprise.
Researchers think they may have found a way to give women more warning. In a study to be published in the June issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, researchers say that anti-Mullerian hormone, or AMH, is actually a better predictor of a woman's reproductive age than chronological age. AMH is a marker of what doctors call ovarian reserve, which is related to the quality and number of eggs in the ovaries and how well the ovarian follicles, tiny sacs in which eggs mature, respond to hormones.
To read the entire article, go here.