A woman’s ovaries bring center-stage energy for decades of her life: governing fertility and interacting with organs from the brain to the heart, from the skeleton to the immune system. Because of that, they have attracted scads of scientific research.
But after menopause, around age 50, the spotlight on the ovary has historically gone dark. A study published Wednesday in the journal Aging Cell shows that an ovary continues to play an important role even in its retirement years, with functions that do not diminish and may still affect the rest of the body.
“People talked about the postmenopausal ovary as this defunct organ,” said study co-author Francesca Duncan, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University. “They called it a shriveled husk.”
That description never made sense, representing the scientific community’s bias far more than reality. “Nothing in biological systems is truly inert,” said Hattie Chung, a systems and computational biologist at the Yale School of Medicine who was not involved in the new research. “Cells do not just become static in any organ, no matter how old you may be.”
The ovary completely reshapes itself each menstrual cycle as the follicles and eggs it contains trigger a surge of hormones that impact every system of the body. By the time most women turn 50, the ovaries are down to so few eggs that they cannot sustain this cycling, leading to menopause and prompting many scientists to lose interest.
Duncan and her colleagues tested that proposition by analyzing 28 healthy ovaries taken from women between the ages of 50 and 75. After measuring levels of nearly 6,000 proteins found in the tissues, they saw that many proteins stay more or less consistent across the years. They also identified one set of proteins that was produced much more by the younger ovaries than the oldest ones, as well as a second group that was produced at much lower rates.
The result was a striking distinction between the ovaries of women in their 50s versus those in their 70s, according to Duncan. “Those ovaries looked completely different, and we could almost age the ovaries based on their molecular signatures,” she said. “They’re actually changing, quite dynamically.”
The team also found plenty of molecules that may act as signals on other organs, opening up the possibility that the ovary’s full-body impacts may continue even after menopause.
And though the ovaries analyzed were healthy, some of the changes seen in later years paralleled signs of ovarian cancer. That is not necessarily surprising, Duncan and Chung agreed: Because of how active the ovary is during menstruation, it’s naturally prone to inflammation — a condition that seems to help cancer cells thrive. Yet given that half of the women diagnosed with ovarian cancer are 63 or older, Duncan said she hopes further research on postmenopausal ovaries can help doctors determine why older people face this higher risk.
Above all, the study underscores why the postmenopausal ovary is worthy of attention.
“Women are living three [more] decades with this organ in their body, and we have no idea what it’s doing,” Duncan said. “We really owe it to half our population to understand what’s happening.”
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