A study conducted on almost 3,000 women in the United States, has revealed that women who have sexual activity weekly or more frequently – including intercourse, oral sex, sexual touching or self-stimulation are 28% less likely to experience menopause at any given age than women who said they had sex less than once a month.
Megan Arnot, a PhD candidate at University College London (UCL) who co-led the research said it is pointing to a form of biological energy trade-off. She also inferred that the findings backed the idea of human menopause originally evolving to reduce reproductive conflict between generations of females and to allow older women increase their fitness through investing in their grandchildren.
Though Arnot admitted that women are more susceptible to disease during ovulation because their immune systems are depressed at that time, she however added that the apparent “biological trade-off” is that it would be pointlessly costly to invest energy in the ovulation process if a woman is having little or no sex and is hence unlikely to fall pregnant, which is why the body diverts energy resources into protecting and caring for existing offspring.
She said;
“If a woman is not having sex, and there is no chance of pregnancy, then the body ‘chooses’ not to invest in ovulation, as it would be pointless.
“The menopause is, of course, an inevitability for women, and there is no behavioural intervention that will prevent reproductive cessation,” said Ruth Mace, a professor of anthropology at UCL who worked on the study with Arnot.
“Nonetheless, these results are an initial indication that menopause timing may be adaptive in response to the likelihood of becoming pregnant.”
Reuters reported that the research which was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, was based on data from the US Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation also known as the SWAN study.
