Is the cause of menopause a demon in the rib?
Men are to blame for menopause
A group of Canadian scientists came to an unexpected conclusion: men are the cause of menopause in women. According to the researchers, natural selection is to blame for everything: men prefer to look for younger women as a sexual partner, so older women "get out of the game" with the help of menopause. The results of this study are published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology (Morton et al., Mate Choice and the Origin of Menopause).
Menopause in the whole animal world is peculiar only to humans, but until now scientists cannot explain in detail why it occurs. Currently, biologists adhere to the theory that menopause serves as a kind of "limiter" of female reproduction, since the birth of a child by a woman at an age is fraught with problems for the baby and complications for the woman herself. And menopause occurs when a woman's body can no longer conceive, bear and give birth to a child without complications. Another theory – the "grandmother theory" – suggests that menopause "turns off" a woman's fertility at a certain age so that she helps her children take care of grandchildren, thereby increasing the chances of a kind of survival.
Biologist Rama Singh from McMaster University, Ontario, is convinced that the mechanism of "turning off" fertility cannot be laid down by nature – this would contradict the process of natural selection, for which reproduction is necessary. The scientist is sure that modern theories of menopause confuse cause and effect: in his opinion, it is the cessation of reproduction that triggers the onset of menopause in a woman. And this termination is due to the fact that men historically try to find younger companions for sexual relations, paying less and less attention to older women.
For the course of natural selection, it is most important that healthy, young women have the maximum chance of conception, so the onset of menopause not only deprives older women of the opportunity to get pregnant, but also triggers a number of health problems – osteoporosis, serious hormonal changes, tumors of the reproductive system and others. As a result, women simply "drop out" of natural selection. The researchers also suggest that the situation could have been exactly the opposite if women had historically chosen younger men to procreate. Such a situation could lead to the fact that menopause would begin to develop already in the strong half of humanity.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru19.06.2013