Scientific Presentations
LabTalks@DCD
Department of Digital and Computational Demography
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Rostock, Germany, April 02, 2025
11:00 AM: Talk with Irena Chen - Investigating the Association between Emotional and Self Reported Health Trajectories and Entry into the Menopausal Transition
Room 400 and Zoom
Abstract
Menopause is a significant life transition with potential long- term health implications for women during the midlife. Despite large individual variations in age at menopause and severity of menopausal symptoms, how this heterogeneity arises is poorly understood. We hypothesize that poor pre-menopausal health may be linked to earlier menopause and severe symptoms. Using a joint model, we assume that the observed responses to emotional health questions can be summarized as lower-dimensional latent trajectories. We then link these trajectories to menopausal outcomes. We use data from the German Family Panel to model pre-menopausal self-reported health trajectories and relate these trajectories to the timing of menopause entry and menopausal symptom severity. Preliminary analyses suggest emotional health can be captured by latent affect trajectories and that there is substantial individual variation in the evolution of these affects. However, we do not find that variations in emotional or self reported health significantly predict the timing of menopause for women in our study. We plan to investigate if this is also true for the severity of symptoms experienced by women during the MT.
About
Irena Chen is a Research Scientist at the Department of Digital and Computational Demography in the Laboratory of Population Dynamics and Sustainable Wellbeing. She has worked on Bayesian models for applications in women’s health, population epidemiology, and aging populations.
Register to Take Part
You would like to attend the Online Seminar Talk? You are very welcome. Please register by writing an e-mail to office-zagheni@demogr.mpg.de.
Online Seminar Talk, April, 2nd from 11:00 a.m. to 12 p.m. (Rostock time)