Crucially, this isn’t just about the age at which you stop bleeding – but what you do about it when the time comes. Dr Sheikh says that there’s evidence to suggest that replacing hormones with hormone replacement therapy (HRT) reduces all-cause mortality – including cardiovascular disease (the biggest killer of women).

Sadly, many women don’t accept HRT for fear of breast cancer. This attitude, Dr Sheikh says, has largely been fostered by a 1993 study called the Women’s Health Initiative. The findings, she claims, were so flawed that the whole study “did a huge disservice to women”.

Using a million women, researchers looked at the effect HRT had on cardiovascular disease and found that the treatment did improve mortality. They also found a link to increased risk of breast cancer. However, the study – which wasn’t designed to look at breast cancer – was put out before the researchers had a chance to look at the data. Because cardiovascular disease takes so long to develop, they’d recruited women above the age of 60 – a decade out from menopause – and many were smokers who already had developed hypertension or cardiovascular disease. Then they were put on oestrogen and synthetic progestin. Dr Sheikh says: “There’s a big difference between natural progesterone and synthetic progestin. It’s likely that it was those progestins that triggered the slight increase in breast cancer, but it wasn’t statistically significant.”

She stresses that HRT is protective against all-cause mortality, mostly because of the cardiovascular and brain benefits.

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