Anyone with ovaries who lives long enough will experience menopause. While menopause is a natural transition in midlife, it can strongly affect a person’s quality of life and their current and future risk of heart disease, osteoporosis and other issues. So you might think that whether someone is experiencing or has gone through menopause would be noted in their medical records.

But when we and our colleagues examined the electronic medical records of almost 240,000 women, only 12% included mention of menopause, even though more than half the women reported separately that they were experiencing this transition. Our findings, published in the journal Menopause, reveal a major gap in how clinicians capture basic information about women’s health.

The menopausal women we examined are from a broader group of 400,000 who participated in the All of Us Research Program, a nationwide study run by the National Institutes of Health to compile a wide range of health data from at least 1 million Americans. We looked at how information about menopause was included in electronic health records and how this information differed by........

© The Conversation