Menopause and Disorders of Neurological Function and Mental Health

Abstract

An expert panel was assembled under the auspices of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women’s Health, and the Giovanni Lorenzini Medical Foundation. The overarching goal was to develop an international position paper on the topic, “Women’s Health and Menopause—A Comprehensive Approach.” The work of the panel was conducted between the Fall of 1998 and the Summer of 2001. The panel was subdivided by topic areas, and the focus of our particular working group included disorders of neurological function and mental health. Like other working groups, ours was charged with the development of evidence-based practice recommendations. Evidence was resulting primarily from an evaluation of the published literature, and evidence and derived recommendations were categorized according to four levels of certainty: a rich body of data from randomized controlled trials, a limited body of data from randomized controlled trials, evidence from nonrandomized trials or observational studies, and panel consensus. For none of the disorders considered by our working group was there a rich body of clinical trial data, and for many even observational data were sparse.