Menopause is a major health milestone, yet health records barely track it - new research

Researchers examining electronic health records for nearly 240,000 women in the NIH's All of Us Research Program found that only 12% of records mentioned menopause, even though more than half of those women reported separately, on their own surveys, that they were experiencing it. Basic details like age at menopause onset and symptoms such as hot flashes were largely missing from both records and surveys alike.

The researchers say it's unclear why documentation is so sparse; menopause isn't classified as a disease, so it may simply not occur to clinicians to log it, even though timing and symptom severity vary widely and carry real implications for future heart disease and osteoporosis risk. The team is now developing a simple check-in questionnaire and computational methods to infer menopause status from other health data, and is examining whether income, culture or geography predict which patients get documented at all.

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