Sex may delay menopause, study finds. Researchers have noted that sexually active women reach this stage of their life more slowly than those who are less so.
On average, intimate relationships at least once a week reduced the chances of entering menopause by 28% compared to women who have sex less than once a month, they reported Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
The body "maximizes" physical fitness
According to the study, this could be explained by a response of the body to the pressures of evolution. "If a woman has little or infrequent intercourse around the age of 40, her body will not receive the physical signals of a possible pregnancy," write Megan Arnot and Ruth Mace, scientists at University College. London. "From a perspective of maximizing physical fitness", the woman's body could then invest more of her energy in her life rather than in ovulation.
Previous research, seeking to explain why married women reach menopause later than those never married or divorced, has evoked the influence of male pheromones, natural chemicals from the animal kingdom that attract the opposite sex.
52 years on average
To find out if any of these theories hold water, Arnot and Mace looked at data on nearly 3,000 women in the United States, recruited in 1996 and 1997 to participate in a decades-long health study . This project (SWAN) made it possible to follow the changes - both biological and psychological - occurring at the same time as menopause. The average age of the participants was 46 years. None had entered menopause, but just under half were "peri-menopausal", with minor symptoms beginning to appear.
Over the next decade, 45% of women experienced natural menopause, at age 52 on average. The correlation between the frequency of sexual intercourse and the onset of menopause was undeniable, according to the researchers. Since all of the relationships reported were heterosexual, it is unclear whether homosexual activity would have a similar effect.
However, no link was observed between the presence of indwelling men and the subliminal chemical signals that men could emit: "We have found no evidence for the hypothesis of pheromones". The age of natural menopause varies considerably in different cultures. Genetic factors account for only about half of these differences, as previous research has shown.
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