From the moment your existence begins as an immature egg growing in your grandmother’s womb, everything related to your fertility is finite. But in the bright, open labs of the University of Cambridge, scientists may only be a few years from changing this.
Dr Staša Stanković is just one of them. The computer she works from in Cambridge’s Addenbrooke’s Hospital has seen some of the discipline’s most important data. Now, Stanković turns eagerly from her screen to explain the mysteries her team hopes to understand.
The biggest of which is a woman’s ovaries – and the limited supply of eggs they contain. She describes to me this concept as an hourglass: sand (or, rather, eggs) can only leak in one direction. When it’s almost run out, menopause hits.
“What we are trying to do with our science is control that middle bit of the hourglass,” she says. “We want to narrow it down so that less and less sand falls through during your lifespan. That way, we can preserve the upper part for as long as possible – with the mission to also maintain the quality of those remaining eggs.”
For five years, Stanković has been part of a team working to develop a method that could predict your natural fertility window – and therefore your menopausal age. Already, the test achieves around 65 per cent accuracy, but needs 80 per cent to be considered for clinical practice.
But the team’s focus is also on a solution that comes after the test: a drug that could tackle infertility and, potentially, delay menopause.
Your age at menopause depends on how big your ovarian reserve is at birth, and then how quickly those eggs die during your life. Menopause usually hits when you are around 50 years old and have fewer than 1000 eggs left.
For the 10 per cent of women with early menopause (under 45 years old), and the rare 1 per cent of women who have menopause before 40, this drug could be life-changing.
Your menopausal age
Rather than using physical checks of your ovaries or egg counts, the researchers need just a drop of blood. With this, they can learn about you, your genes, and all the genetic factors that could impact fertility and menopause.
The team has pored over the data of over 200,000 women stored in the UK Biobank. This ‘big data’ includes not only information about these individuals’ menopause and fertility, but pretty much anything else related to their health.
“We have data on how many times you watch television per day, your hormones, diseases you suffer from, MRI scans and more. With those data, we are now starting to build networks between not only reproductive health but also other health outcomes – like dementia or diabetes, for example.”
