AI reveals how the female body changes during menopause

Scientists have developed a new artificial intelligence tool that tracks how individual organs in the female reproductive system change with age and during menopause, Euronews reports. The study provides a deeper look into the processes within the body and reveals unexpected differences in the way organs age.

The study was conducted by researchers from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and aims to clarify how hormonal changes affect the entire reproductive system, rather than just individual organs.

Weight gain, hot flashes at any time of day, waking up with night sweats, or experiencing emotional fluctuations. These are the most visible and well-known changes in the female body during menopause. Menopausal and postmenopausal women have an increased risk of cardiovascular, metabolic, neurodegenerative, and bone diseases.

A growing number of studies are attempting to understand exactly what happens in the phase following the reproductive period. Until now, however, how this hormonally induced change affects the reproductive system as a whole remained unclear.

To better understand how this process affects health, researchers at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (Centro Nacional de Supercomputación, BSC-CNS) are developing the first large-scale map of female reproductive system aging using artificial intelligence. They combined 1,112 tissue images from 659 samples, covering 304 women aged between 20 and 70, with gene expression data from thousands of genes. This allowed them to reconstruct how seven key organs—the uterus, ovaries, vagina, cervix, breasts, and fallopian tubes—age over time.

The study utilizes the computational power of the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer and advanced image recognition methods to process the data. Using deep learning techniques, scientists were able to detect both visible tissue changes and the underlying molecular processes associated with aging in each organ.

The result is a detailed map of the reproductive system’s aging process, examined organ by organ.

It appears that not all organs age in the same way or at the same rate. The ovaries and vagina show a more gradual aging process that begins even before the official onset of menopause.

In contrast, the uterus appears to undergo a more abrupt change around the time of menopause. Another surprise is that even within a single organ, different tissues can age at different rates. In the uterus, for example, the lining and the muscular layer do not change synchronously. These tissues appear particularly sensitive to the hormonal and biological changes associated with menopause.

The results show that menopause is not simply the end of the ovaries’ reproductive function, says Marta Melé, head of the Transcriptomics and Functional Genomics group at BSC and director of the study.

“Our results show that it acts as a turning point that profoundly reorganizes other organs and tissues of the reproductive system and allows us to identify the genes and molecular processes that may be behind these changes,” she says.

Building on the discovery that organs age with different dynamics, co-author Laura Ventura adds that the research “paves the way for personalized medicine, where treatment is tailored to the specific molecular profile of each woman and the specific tissues showing the strongest signs of aging.”

The study also identified molecular signals associated with reproductive system aging that could be detected in blood samples from more than 21,441 women. These biomarkers could allow physicians to track the status of reproductive organs in a non-invasive manner. This could help predict risks associated with menopause, such as pelvic floor complications, without the need for biopsies.

According to the researchers, this opens the possibility for simpler and more accessible clinical tools to monitor women’s health over time.