title: Distribution of age at menopause in two Danish samples.
abstract: We analyzed the distribution of reported age at natural menopause in two random samples of Danish women (n = 176 and n = 150) to determine the shape of the distribution and to disclose any possible trends in the distribution parameters. It was necessary to correct the frequencies of the reported ages for the effect of differing ages at reporting. The corrected distribution of age at menopause differs from the normal distribution in the same way in both samples. Both distributions could be described by a mixture of two normal distributions. It appears that most of the parameters of the normal distribution mixtures remain unchanged over a 50-year time lag. The position of the distribution, that is, the mean age at menopause, however, increases slightly but significantly.
authors.affiliation: Department of Social Medicine, University of Odense, Denmark.
authors.forename: J L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Boldsen
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Jeune
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D003718:Denmark; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008593:Menopause / Q000502:physiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D008954:Models, Biological; D013223:Statistics as Topic