MenoScale: ZOE’s latest study on menopause

First released online on the 4th of September 2024, MenoScale is a free-to-use online tool that helps people understand how their menopause symptoms impact their life. 

ZOE designed the tool to empower individuals by helping them track their symptoms and understand how lifestyle factors, like diet and exercise, influence them.

How does it work?

The tool asks how affected you have been by 20 menopause symptoms in the past week. 

People can select “not at all,” “a little,” “quite a bit,” or “extremely.” This generates an overall score from 0 to 100 depending on the number and impact of symptoms.

This research has now been published in the scientific journal Post Reproductive Health.

What did we do?

To investigate, our scientists compared the MenoScale against two other scales:

1. Greene Climacteric Scale (GCS): The most commonly used menopause symptom scale.

2. RAND 36-item Health Survey 1.0: This assesses general health and quality of life.

In particular, the researchers wanted to check MenoScale’s:

• Construct validity: Does the MenoScale truly measure the concept of menopause experience as intended?

• Internal validity: Does the structure of the questionnaire make sense?

• Internal consistency: How well do the questions work together to capture the menopause experience?

• Test-retest reliability: How reproducible and consistent are the results?

The final analysis included data from 1,010 peri- and postmenopausal women (aged 37–70 years). Participants took each of the three questionnaires twice, 7 days apart. Some participants also completed a food frequency questionnaire.

Additionally, ZOE’s scientists analyzed the MenoScale responses of more than 65,000 women who completed the questionnaire online.

What did we find?

According to the authors of the study, our analysis showed that MenoScale “is a valid and reliable tool for assessing menopause symptoms, offering a comprehensive assessment of the menopausal experience.”

The MenoScale score was also able to reliably predict quality of life.

Importantly, we showed that people who follow a healthy diet have slightly lower MenoScale scores — in other words, eating well is associated with a lower impact of symptoms. 

However, to understand how important this effect is, we need to carry out studies with more people.

Interestingly, while vasomotor symptoms, like hot flashes and night sweats, are considered the hallmarks of menopause, MenoScale data shows they are not the most common.

In fact, psychological and cognitive symptoms, like depression or mood swings, are more common.

Make sense of your menopause

Our MenoScale calculator scores your symptoms so you can better understand them

Get your score

Why it matters

Around half of the global population will experience menopause. Despite this, it’s under-researched, and there’s very little information about how lifestyle changes, like diet, can influence symptoms.

Having a reliable way to measure the number and impact of menopause-associated symptoms opens the door to more discoveries. 

Although there are several ways to assess menopause symptoms, they tend to be paper-based and, therefore, less accessible.

Also, these older questionnaires were designed many decades ago and contain outdated language.

MenoScale provides a simple, free, easy-to-access way for women to track their experience and discover how lifestyle changes impact their symptoms.

It will also be useful for researchers who wish to investigate how lifestyle factors can be modified to help women navigate this often challenging time of life.

Follow this link to try it for yourself.