ArticleScientific reports2018
Evidence for a maximum "shelf-life" of oocytes in mammals suggests that human menopause may be an implication of meiotic arrest.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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14 citing papers in PubMed, 28 citations in OpenAlex.
- Menopause Averted a Midlife Energetic Crisis With Help From Older Dependent Children and Parents: A Simulation Study.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Review
- Four decades of annual monitoring reveal declining reproductive success of a migratory baleen whale.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Avoidance of reproductive conflict and the evolution of menopause in chimpanzees.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Rare SNP in theNAR molecular medicine · 2025Article
- From Circuits to Lifespan: Translating Mouse and Human Timelines with Neuroimaging-Based Tractography.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- The role of RAD51 regulators and variants in primary ovarian insufficiency, endometriosis, and polycystic ovary syndrome.NAR molecular medicine · 2024Review
- Enhanced branched-chain amino acid metabolism improves age-related reproduction in C. elegans.Nature metabolism · 2024Article
- Spatial single-cell sequencing of meiosis I arrested oocytes indicates acquisition of maternal transcripts from the soma.Cell reports · 2023Article
- Checkpoint Kinase 1 Is a Key Signal Transducer of DNA Damage in the Early Mammalian Cleavage Embryo.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
- Ovarian aging: mechanisms and intervention strategies.Medical review (2021) · 2022Review
- DNA damage in preimplantation embryos and gametes: specification, clinical relevance and repair strategies.Human reproduction update · 2022Review
- The role of cellular senescence in female reproductive aging and the potential for senotherapeutic interventions.Human reproduction update · 2022Review
- Article
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2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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Abstract
There is an ongoing debate why a trait like human menopause should have evolved. Adaptive explanations explain menopause with fitness benefits of ceasing reproduction, whereas non-adaptive explanations view it as an epiphenomenon. Here we present data in support of non-adaptive explanations of menopause suggesting a maximum shelf-life of oocytes. By analyzing the association between lifespan and age at reproductive senescence across 49 mammal species, we find that the positive association levels off in long lived species, indicating that the age at reproductive senescence has an upper limit. Only in baleen whales there seems to be no evidence for reproductive senescence. We suggest that apart from the baleen whales, the confinement of reproductive senescence in long-lived species may be the result of physiological constraints imposed by the long period of time oocytes remain inactive in an arrested phase of meiosis from their production in utero until ovulation. We therefore conclude that menopause may be an implication of the long duration of meiotic arrest caused by semelgametogenesis together with long lifespan.
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