THURSDAY, March 19, 2026 (HealthDay News) -- Premature menopause is associated with increased lifetime risk for coronary heart disease (CHD) in Black and White women, according to a study published online March 18 in JAMA Cardiology.
Priya M. Freaney, M.D., from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, and colleagues calculated lifetime risk estimates of incident CHD and estimated years lived free of and with CHD by premature menopause status stratified by self-identified race in a prospective population-based cohort study with 163,600 person-years of follow-up from 1964 to 2018. Individual-level data were included from postmenopausal women (aged 55 to 69 years) who self-identified as Black or White across six U.S. cohorts (3,522 Black women and 6,514 White women).
The researchers found that premature natural menopause occurred more often in Black than White women (15.5 versus 4.8 percent). Premature menopause was associated with an increased lifetime risk for incident CHD, with hazard ratios of 1.41 and 1.39 for Black and White women, respectively. The mean years lived free of CHD were 18.2 and 19.1 for Black women with and without premature menopause, respectively; a similar pattern was seen for White women, but neither met statistical significance.
"The vast majority of heart disease is preventable, but people need to know that they're at risk early in life because effective prevention takes decades," Freaney said in a statement.