How naked mole rats could hold the secret to reversing the menopause

Naked mole rats could hold the key to reversing the menopause, a new study suggests.

Female naked mole rats are able to produce new eggs throughout their lifetime, the study found, unlike other mammals which have a finite number of eggs. That discovery could lead to dramatic “improvements in human infertility research”, said New Scientist.

Scientists at Cornell University and the University of Pittsburgh conducted the study by comparing the ovaries of naked mole rats and mice at different stages of development. They found that naked mole rats were not only born with an extraordinary number of egg cells (95 times more than mice), but also that depletion of these cells was also slower. The most telling finding however was that at ten years old naked mole rats still developed new egg cells, suggesting that production could continue throughout their lifetime of more than 30 years.

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The next step is for scientists to “find out what genetic process is triggering the continued production of eggs”, said The Telegraph, with the hope that this can eventually be applied to humans and “help women to continue to have their own children later in life”.

In humans, the number of eggs cells is “capped at birth” with an initial “one-to-two million egg cells” then dropping to “300,000-500,000 by puberty”, explained New Atlas. The number of egg cells then continues to decline until menopause.

The study’s findings give “very useful insight” that could “reset the whole paradigm for how we treat menopause” if it can be transformed into a clinical application, Scott Sills at the Center for Advanced Genetics in California told New Scientist.

People should remain ”cautious” though about concluding that this is an “answer to the menopause”, warned Aspasia Destouni at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, “they’re not there yet”.