Understanding Menopause's Effect on Women's Cardiovascular Risk

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality for women worldwide, yet women remain understudied. Atherosclerosis, the main pathology underlying ischemic CVD, results from abnormal blood lipids and exacerbated inflammation. Lipid profiles change substantially in women with menopause and immune responses, key in initiating and progressing atherosclerosis, vary between sexes. This research aims to understand how menopause and associated hormonal and lipidic changes affect cardiovascular risk in women.

The project, hosted by the University of Seville and led by Prof. Inés Pineda Torra at CABIMER, will combine multiomic hypothesis-generating and focused hypothesis-driven analyses to gain detailed mechanistic insights. Multiomic hypothesis-generating refers to the use of multiple types of high throughput biological data to generate new hypotheses. This includes transcriptomics, which is the study of an organism's entire gene expression makeup, proteomics, which is the study of the entire set of proteins expressed by a genome, and metabolomics, which is the study of the chemical processes involving metabolites. Focused hypothesis-driven refers to testing specific hypotheses through targeted experiments.  

The research will use human immune cells from pre- and menopausal women, as well as young and aged female mouse models, to address key questions about cardiovascular risk in menopause. 

The goal is to enable strategies for preventing cardiovascular disease, personalizing health, improving patient stratification for clinical trials, and identifying new targets for intervention. The results will be shared widely in scientific outlets and with the general public to raise awareness about the lack of research on Women’s Health and the increased cardiovascular risk women can face upon menopause.