Menopause Information: Menopause Might Be Able To Be Predicted Women are born with a built in bioloical clock. There are only so many eggs contained in their ovaries, and once those eggs are gone they never come back. New research has shown that it might be possible to predict when that biological clock is going to stop. Doctors are not saying they can count the exact number of eggs in a woman's ovaries. What they can do, however, is measure the volume of the ovaries. New research is suggesting there is a correlation between volume and number of eggs, and that using these new ultrasound techniques doctors can estimate about how many years a woman has before the onset of menopause. This could turn out to be a very important piece of menopause information. The authors of new study that appeared in the journal Human Reproduction say that these new techniques will revolutionize the new field of care for women seeking assisted reproduction. It is important to note this information still seeks validation in further clinical trials. However, it will very likely be able to benefit women being treated with cancer as well as women who go to fertility clinics. Following is a quote from one of the authors of this study, Dr. Tom Kelsey, Ph.D: "If women looking for some sort of assisted conception and their physicians know that they've got a long time till menopause, then you could plan for a range of treatments," said Kelsey, who is a senior research fellow at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. "If you knew menopause was likely in four to five years, you'd plan a different set of IVF [in vitro fertilization] treatments." It is again important to reiterate, though, that more work still needs to be done. "Should a young woman who is 30 years old go for a test to figure out whether she's got three, five or 10 years left on her fertility? Should she make career decisions and life decisions? Are these data good enough to make those determinations?" asks Dr. Alan Copperman, who is the director of reproductive medicine at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, New York. "The answer is obviously no to all of those questions. The predictive value of this test is not good enough to go and tell someone to change their life." Here is some basic Menopause information on the number of eggs in a woman's ovaries: eggs form in a woman's ovary while they are still in the womb. Estimates say that at birth there are hundreds of thousands of eggs in a woman's ovaries. Generally there are about 300,000 at the start of puberty. By about age 37, the average woman will be left with about 25,000 eggs in her ovaries. At menopause there are roughly only 1,000 eggs left in a woman's ovaries. Current theories hold that the cause of menopause is these egg levels reaching some critical lowpoint which starts menopause.The time at which menopause sets in is widely believed to be based on the number of eggs reaching a critically low threshold. While performed their studies the authors of the article in Human Reproduction measured the volume of ovaries using a special transvaginal ultrasound. Ovaries are known to shrink as women get older. They looked for a relationship between the number of eggs in a woman's ovaries and her ovarian volume. They used this to create computer models that might be able to predict when menopause will come to a woman. As noted, this piece of menopause information needs further study. As of this writing the authors of the study are currently setting up clinical trials to further test their ideas. At the same time that this new piece of menopause information was hitting the journals, another study was saying that women should wait too long if they are seeking assisted reproduction. Technologies used in assisted reproduction might not be able to assist with getting pregnant after a woman hits the age of about 35 years old. Again using computer models, they show that a woman's success rate with assisted reproduction technology (ART) is about 30% at age 30. This drops down to roughly 24% at the age of 35 and down to 17% by age 40 onwards.