Menopause and Traumatic Brain Injury: A NIDILRR Collaborative Traumatic Brain Injury Model Systems Study

Objective

To examine the experience of menopause symptoms in women with traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Design

Cross-sectional descriptive study.

Setting

Five sites of the TBI Model Systems (TBIMS) program.

Participants

Participants were 210 women, aged 40-60 years, who were not taking systemic hormones and did not have both ovaries removed: 61 participants were enrolled in the TBIMS, who were at least 2 years post-TBI and living in the community. One hundred forty-nine participants without TBI were recruited from a research registry and the metropolitan Detroit community.

Interventions

Not applicable.

Main Outcome Measures

A checklist comprised of 21 menopause symptoms assessing 4 symptom clusters (vasomotor, somatic, psychological, and cognitive).

Results

TBI and non-TBI groups did not significantly differ and showed small effect sizes on vasomotor symptoms. On the remaining symptom clusters, women with TBI showed greater presence and severity of symptoms than women without TBI, as well as fewer differences between premenopausal and postmenopausal women on those symptoms. A profile indicating an additive or potentiating effect of TBI on menopause symptoms was not observed.

Conclusions

Findings support a conceptual model of menopause and TBI indicating that symptoms most closely associated with estrogen decline are similar for women with and without TBI, whereas symptoms that overlap with common TBI sequelae are generally more frequent and severe among these women. Likely because of lower baseline of symptoms premenopause, postmenopausal women without TBI reported more numerous and severe symptoms relative to their premenopausal counterparts without TBI. Overall, it may be that women without TBI experience menopause as more of a “change” of life, whereas women with TBI chronically face significantly more of these symptoms than women without TBI.