Dr. Betty Murray describes research showing post-menopausal ovaries don't go dormant. Instead, they shift to immune activity, filling with T cells and macrophages that may fuel cardiovascular plaque formation. Similar changes appear in human ovarian tissue.
Post-reproductive mouse ovaries showed a marked increase in immune cell function, specifically T cells, macrophages, and multinucleated giant cells. What does that mean? That means the cells that are often involved in immune regulation and fighting back on infection, and also that play an inflammatory level in even things like cardiovascular disease, like macrophages being implemented into plaques in your arteries, soft plaques, and they get pulled into that plaque structure underneath the fibrous core of a cholesterol plaque. But what they found was that the ovary appears to shift function. So instead of being egg sort of maturation farms where the eggs mature and the follicle pops open and the egg flies out, that it goes something closer to an immune inflammatory tissue. Wow. The human tissue data showed a similar shift to the mice, and especially in protein expression across age groups, lending to early support of the mouse findings.
