ArticleBMC medical research methodology2026
Optimizing cohort criteria for multi-country analysis of women experiencing menopause in administrative databases.
Article in BMC medical research methodology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundLarge electronic datasets do not always correctly identify women (defined as individuals whose sex assigned at birth was female, although we acknowledge that biological sex does not always correlate with gender identity) experiencing menopause or their symptoms, making it challenging to generate robust evidence on the burden of menopause. This study aimed to construct and characterize cohorts of women experiencing menopause to explore differences in their identification based on the cohort criteria and to provide recommendations for defining cohorts of individuals experiencing menopause in real-world data.
methodsThis was a retrospective, multi-country cohort study using databases that included a total of ~240 million individuals from five countries: three observational electronic health record databases from France, Germany, and the UK; and two administrative claims databases from Japan and the USA. Demographic, comorbidity, and concomitant medication covariates were used to characterize the study target cohorts at multiple time periods relative to the index event. Counts were calculated for the number of women (as identified in the databases) in each database that matched the target cohort criteria.
resultsCohorts that included a more specific cohort definition of women aged 40–65 with a probable menopause diagnosis with or without symptom criteria produced age distributions that best matched those expected for women experiencing menopause, along with the highest VMS incidence rates. The prevalence of comorbidities varied between databases and cohorts. However, generally, the most common comorbidities were anxiety, depression, hypertension, hypothyroidism, and osteoarthritis.
conclusionsThe findings provide evidence to support the development of a reproducible definition of menopause and menopause symptoms, which can be used for future analysis of observational healthcare databases.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.