American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access originally published online on September 8, 2008
American Journal of Epidemiology 2008 168(9):1091-1092; doi:10.1093/aje/kwn240
American Journal of Epidemiology © The Author 2008. Published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
The Authors Reply
Katherine DeLellis Henderson1,
Leslie Bernstein1,
Brian Henderson2,
Laurence Kolonel3 and
Malcolm Pike2
1 Department of Cancer Etiology, City of Hope National Medical Center, Duarte, CA 91010
2 Department of Preventive Medicine, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2821
3 Cancer Research Center of Hawaii, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI 96813
(e-mail: khenderson{at}coh.org)
We thank Mumford and Hasan (1) for their interest in our work (2) and agree with them that racial/ethnic variations do not necessarily imply genetic differences. In reaching the conclusion that our results support the hypothesis that the timing of natural menopause is driven by a combination of genetic, reproductive, and lifestyle factors, we had in mind the fact that our findings are in line with a growing literature supporting the hypothesis that age at natural menopause is a highly heritable trait (3–9). We also agree with the need to follow up these findings by searching for specific genetic variants that might contribute to the "genetic" component of age at natural menopause. Indeed, we are currently engaged in developing candidate gene association studies of age at natural menopause and hope to identify new candidate loci through examination of data from genome-wide association studies, which could then be examined within and across racial/ethnic groups.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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This work was supported by the National Cancer Institute (CA
63464, CA 54281). In addition, K.D.H. was supported as a postdoctoral
fellow by the National Institute on Aging (Multidisciplinary
Research Training in Gerontology grant 732-AG 00037).
Conflict of interest: none declared.
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References
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- Mumford SL, Hasan R. Re: "Predictors of the timing of natural menopause in the Multiethnic Cohort Study" [letter]. Am J Epidemiol (2008) 168(9):1091.[Free Full Text]
- Henderson KD, Bernstein L, Henderson B, et al. Predictors of the timing of natural menopause in the Multiethnic Cohort Study. Am J Epidemiol (2008) 167(11):1287–1294.[Abstract/Free Full Text]
- van Noord PA, Dubas JS, Dorland M, et al. Age at natural menopause in a population-based screening cohort: the role of menarche, fecundity, and lifestyle factors. Fertil Steril (1997) 68(1):95–102.[CrossRef][Web of Science][Medline]
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- Torgerson DJ, Thomas RE, Campbell MK, et al. Alcohol consumption and age of maternal menopause are associated with menopause onset. Maturitas (1997) 26(1):21–25.[CrossRef][Web of Science][Medline]
- Treloar SA, Do KA, Martin NG. Genetic influences on the age at menopause. Lancet (1998) 352(9134):1084–1085.[CrossRef][Web of Science][Medline]
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