Clinical Sports Medicine

Abstract

Purpose: The menopausal transition is a critical period in womens lives. The central aim of the present study was to evaluate the effect of a multimodal exercise protocol on the cardiometabolic risk factor potentially related to menopausal transition in early postmenopausal women. Methods: Fifty-four (54) early-postmenopausal women (54.01.8 years) were randomly assigned to two groups: (1) exercise group (EG: n=27) which conducted a high intensity aerobic and resistance training three times/week and (2) active control group (CG: n=27) exercising once a week with low exercise intensity. Besides bone density, the main variable of this project, the outcome variable in this thesis was also cardiometabolic risk, as summarized by the Metabolic Syndrome (MetS) Z-Score. We applied Intention-to-Treat (ITT) and Per Protocol Analyses (PPA) with multiple imputation and used standardized mean differences to illustrate the effects.Results: After 16 weeks of exercise two participants (EG: n=1; CG: n=1) were lost to follow-up. Effects for the MetS Z-Score were moderate (EG: -0.361.36 vs. CG: 0.512.28; SMD: 0.47, 95% CI: -0.08 to 1.03), albeit borderline non-significant (ITT: p=.089; PPA: p=.060). Conclusion: The present multimodal exercise protocol just failed to affect the MetS Z-Score and its underlying cardiometabolic risk factors. Whether this result can be generalized to the entire cohort of early-postmenopausal women or whether it has to be attributed to the only moderately high exercise intensity during the early weeks of the intervention along with a relatively short intervention period remains to be evaluated.Key Words: Metabolic Syndrome, MetS Z-Score, Menopausal Transition