Using Network Analysis to Understand the Associations Between Menopausal Symptoms and Mental Health in Women With Intellectual Disabilities.

The study looked at a single point in time, so it can show that these things occur together but not that menopausal symptoms cause anxiety, behaviour change or prescribing. The network analysis rested on 99 women and did not detect the link between menopause-specific anxiety and challenging behaviour that the regression analysis found; the authors put this down to the small sample, and the network did not control for age, where the woman lived, or level of intellectual disability. Menopause symptoms were collected with survey questions adapted from a general-population study, not a scale validated for women with intellectual disabilities, because none exists. Only 41.4% of the menopausal women reported symptoms, which the authors suggest may mean symptoms are hard to put into words, so the study may miss women who are affected. Confidence intervals for two of the odds ratios were very wide because of small numbers of women in some categories, so those estimates are imprecise. No data on depression related to menopause were available for this analysis. The regression results reported here come from models reduced by AIC selection; the full models are reported only in supplementary tables.

Funded by Stewarts Care Services Ltd, the Health Research Board (IDS-TILDA-2021-001) and the Department of Children, Disability and Equality. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Do not read this as proof that menopausal symptoms cause anxiety, challenging behaviour or psychotropic prescribing. The data come from one round of interviews, so they show only that these things occur together, and the network analysis rested on 99 women.