Assessment of contributing risk factors for premature menopause in Bangladesh: Cox proportional hazard model analysis

Background
Premature menopause has received much attention due to the increased life expectancy of women. It is harmful for women’s lives, and it brings changes in women’s behaviour. No study has been carried out in Bangladesh concerning premature menopause based on a national survey.

Objectives
The aim of this study was to explore the scenario of premature menopause among Bangladeshi women and to identify the risk factors associated with premature menopause.

Material and methods
In this study, we considered secondary data from the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) 2014. Data was collected from 17,863 ever-married women within the reproductive age of 15–49 years using two-stage stratified cluster sampling. The BDHS report showed that a women could not experience menopause before the age of 30 years. Thus, we took into consideration 9,336 women 30 years of age and above. After deleting the missing values and usual observations, 8,885 samples were considered for our final analysis. The Log-rank test and Cox proportional hazard model were used for statistical analysis.

Results
The results showed that region, educational attainment, wealth index, employment status, marital status and contraceptive method use status were statistically significant risk factors for premature menopause in Bangladesh.

Conclusions
From the entire study, it was confirmed that there were several risk factors for premature menopause in Bangladesh.