Utilization of survival analysis to predict age of natural menopause for working women in Alexandria University

ABSTRACT

A stratified random sample of 527 women aged 40-65 years was selected in two stages. In the first stage, five colleges were selected randomly from a list of all collages; in the second stage, stratification was made according to job and the sample was allocated proportionally over strata. Two methods of survival analysis were used The Kaplan-Meier method was used to estimate the median age at the natural menopause and Cox-regression analysis was used to study the correlates of age at the natural menopause. The mean current age of the study group was 47.23 +/- 5.06 years, 26.8% were staff, 59.0% employees and 14.2% workers. Cox-regression revealed that women with higher hazard of menopause at a given age are characteristically of low job category, consumers of red meat > once/week, with a small amount of menstrual bleeding, not practicing sporting, with chronic illness, with > 24 years age at first full-term pregnancy and with late age at menarche. Monitoring of the timing of age at the natural menopause may be a useful instrument to assess the impact of intervention strategies aimed at changing practices related to family planning and contraception