We’ve all heard of menopause: a supposedly terminal moment for the female reproductive system, in which the ovaries stop releasing eggs and presumably call it a day.
But reproductive biologist Francesca Duncan is not content with this simplified image of ovarian retirement.
She has been trying to understand what ovaries get up to once they stop pumping out eggs. It turns out it’s much less like retirement, and more like a career change.
Life expectancies are generally stretching further than ever before, which means there’s now far more post-menopausal people wandering around, whose bodies we still don’t fully understand.
A new study of mice, published in Molecular Human Reproduction by Duncan at Northwestern University in Illinois and a team of researchers across the US, suggests that the post-menopausal ovary is far from inert.
