the ovaries Time Machine. It travels into the future and reaches old age before the rest of the body. At birth, each ovary contains about 1 million follicles. However, the decline of these follicles is immediate and constant. Only about 300,000 survive to puberty. By age 40, the majority are gone. And by the time he’s 51, the average age of menopause in the United States, virtually no one goes through menopause.
Humans are strange in this regard. Most mammals remain fertile until the end of their lives. The only species known to go through menopause naturally are humans and some whales. In humans, hormonal loss during menopause causes a range of adverse health effects. Bones become brittle. Metabolism slows down. Increased risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke, and dementia. Paradoxically, even though women live longer than men, they spend much of their senior years in poor health.
Jennifer Garrison has a hunch that the ovaries are to blame. Garrison, an assistant professor at the Buck Institute for Aging in Novato, California, says, “The cocktail of chemicals that the ovaries make—the orchestra of chemicals that the ovaries make.” is very important for overall health.” “When it disappears during menopause, it has a dramatic effect.” On the other hand, keeping the ovaries functioning longer appears to offer longevity benefits. It turns out that you are likely to live to be 90.
Despite the fact that half the world’s population experiences ovarian aging, including cisgender women and transgender and nonbinary people, the long-standing gender bias in science remains understudied. It is meant to remain a field. But that is starting to change.
Garrison launched the Buck Institute’s Center for Reproductive Lifespan and Equity, a first-of-its-kind facility founded in 2018 with a $6 million donation from attorney and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan. leading. In 2019, the Institute launched a related initiative, the Global Consortium for Reproductive Lifespan and Equality, to fund external researchers. Her first 22 researchers received an initial grant totaling $7.4 million. Their goal is to understand why the ovaries appear to be intricately related to health and longevity. It could potentially mean prolonging life.
In 2018, the reproductive lifespan field was still in its infancy, and Garrison struggled to find faculty to interview, let alone hire staff for the center. The only other mammals that experience it are whales, and it cannot be studied accurately in the laboratory, so few people have actively studied it. It is also difficult to study aging in humans. For example, killer whales can live up to 90 years in the wild. Instead, researchers have often attempted to decipher the link between menopause and aging by proxy. We’ve looked at the effects of chemotherapy on fertility, studied common menopause treatments that mimic female hormones, and experimented with mice, but this is an imperfect substitute for humans.
Five years later, the Buck Institute’s efforts are beginning to yield results. Researchers may not yet have found a way to slow the aging of the reproductive organs, but it has sparked interest in a long-overlooked organ that shows how everyone, not just people with ovaries, can do it. “If we can understand what’s going on in the ovary, perhaps we can learn something about aging in the rest of the body, and we can intervene.” It will also give us clues as to how,” says Garrison.
