SoS 179: What do grip strength and toe tapping have to do with Menopause? Dr. Sievert explains!

Prof. Lynnette Leidy Sievert joins Chris and Cara to discuss how hot flashes, and other symptoms of menopause, vary around the world. Stick around for "offboarding" career advice and a conversation about fish! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lynnette Leidy Sievert has studied variation in age at menopause and symptoms at midlife for more than 30 years. In collaboration with local researchers, she carried out studies of menopause in western Massachusetts; Hilo, Hawaii; the Selška Valley, Slovenia; Asunción and Mbaracayu, Paraguay; Puebla and Campeche, Mexico; Sylhet, Bangladesh; and London, UK, as well as pilot studies in Odisha, India, and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Sievert also studies and writes about the evolution of menopause and post-reproductive life. Of late, she has been disentangling the experience of hot flashes from the heat and humidity of Campeche, Mexico, and planning to study hot flashes in the winter cold of Mongolia. Her current study is on hot flashes in relation to estimates of brown adipose tissue. Sievert is an elected Fellow of the AAAS, served on the Board of Trustees of the North American Menopause Society, and was the Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Human Biology, the journal of the Human Biology Association. Her paper discussed on today's show, titled "Hand grip strength, standing balance, and rapid foot tapping in relation to the menopausal transition in Campeche, Mexico," can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajhb.23781 Contact Prof. Lynnette Sievert via e-mail at: leidy@umass.edu. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association: Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation Website:humbio.org/, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc Cara Ocobock, Website: sites.nd.edu/cara-ocobock/, Email:cocobock@nd.edu, Twitter:@CaraOcobock Chris Lynn, HBA Public Relations Committee Chair, Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, Email: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly Eric Griffith, HBA Junior Fellow, SoS producer: E-mail: eric.griffith@duke.edu