New research suggests that the more estrogen a woman is exposed to over the course of her life, the better. That’s according to a study that spent nearly a decade tracking stroke risk among roughly 123,000 Chinese postmenopausal women.
In the end, investigators concluded that those who had a relatively long reproductive period before menopause appeared to face a lower risk for both an ischemic stroke and a hemorrhagic stroke.
“These results provide new insights into the associations between reproductive factors and the risk of stroke,” said study author Peige Song, a researcher with Zhejiang University’s School of Public Health in Hangzhou, China.
Song and her team focused on a pool of women between the ages of 40 and 79. None had a history of stroke when they had first enrolled in a prior Chinese study between 2004 and 2008.
The team first analyzed study enrollment information regarding the specific length of each woman’s overall reproductive life span leading up to menopause. They found that women in the longest estrogen exposure group had a 5 percent lower risk for ischemic stroke and a 13 percent lower risk for a hemorrhagic stroke than women in the shortest exposure group.
The finding suggests that women who experience more stillbirths, miscarriages, or pregnancy terminations might face a higher risk for stroke, while those who take oral contraceptives might see their risk fall.
Still, Song cautioned that on the latter point, the study had only “limited information on oral contraceptive use.”