A major analysis of data from nearly 396,000 women suggests that menopause is frequently absent from electronic health records, even when women themselves report having experienced it. Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz examined information from participants in the National Institutes of Health's All of Us Research Program and found a striking gap between what women reported in surveys and what appeared in their medical records. The findings highlight a widespread lack of menopause documentation that researchers say could limit efforts to better understand women's health and disease risk.
Menopause is a normal stage of life, yet the study found it was rarely documented in electronic health records (EHRs). Across the entire dataset, only about 7 percent of women had menopause recorded in their medical records. Lead author Audrey Hendricks told Newsweek that one of the biggest reasons for the gap is simply that menopause is not routinely captured during medical visits.
"The biggest reason is we don't ask," she said. "In the doctor's office, menopause is often only recorded because a woman brings it up." She added that unlike measurements such as blood pressure or weight, menopause is not consistently documented in standardized fields and may only appear in physicians' notes, making it harder for researchers to access and study. The gap became even more apparent when researchers compared survey responses with EHR data.
Among women who said in surveys that they had gone through menopause, only around 14 percent had menopause documented in their electronic health records. The numbers revealed a large mismatch between the two data sources. Researchers identified roughly 193,000 reports of menopause in participant surveys but found only about 28,000 menopause diagnoses in electronic health records.
Put another way, menopause appeared nearly seven times more often in survey responses than in medical records. Importantly, the researchers say the issue was not that medical records were routinely inaccurate. Instead, the problem was that menopause information was often missing altogether.
When menopause was documented in an electronic health record, it generally matched what women reported in surveys. Women who had a menopause diagnosis in their records almost always also reported menopause themselves. This suggests that the available records were usually consistent with participant reports, but many women simply had no menopause-related information recorded.
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