the menopause cliff

October 13, 2026

Tonight: dozens of maternity wards already gone before Medicaid cuts fully land, the menopause “cliff” hiding in your blood work, and more.

Fifty-two maternity wards have closed since a bill cutting federal Medicaid funding was signed into law in July 2025, and eight more have announced closures. The Guardian reports the count, which comes from the advocacy group Protect Our Care. The bill won’t fully take effect until next year, but hospitals in Virginia and rural Georgia have already cited the coming Medicaid changes as a reason for shutting their units. Medicaid pays for about 40% of U.S. births. March of Dimes has identified 131 at-risk rural hospitals with labor and delivery units; if they close, 96 counties would be left without one.

Menopause may bring abrupt changes across the body, a large analysis in Nature Medicine suggests. Researchers analyzed more than 300 million lab results from over a million women in the U.S. and Israel. They examined 90 different measures of health and found more than half shifted sharply around the final menstrual period, including markers of bone, liver, and kidney health, cholesterol, and hormones. Men showed no comparable pattern. Women taking hormone therapy appeared to have smaller shifts, though the observational study cannot prove the treatment caused that difference. Some hormone changes began more than a decade before the last period.

Women with autoimmune diseases were nearly 75% more likely than men to say their symptoms had been misdiagnosed as psychosomatic. And they were almost 50% more likely to report a psychiatric misdiagnosis, according to a survey of about 6,600 patients. Men most often reported getting a diagnosis within three months; for women it was most often one to two years. Men, meanwhile, were slightly more likely to be misdiagnosed with a different physical disease. “As women we still often have a harder time having our symptoms believed,” said co-author Shaista Tayabali.

Doctors are urging women who tested negative for breast and ovarian cancer genes years ago to retest, The Washington Post reports. Early tests focused on BRCA1 and BRCA2 and missed some variants that today’s panels of dozens of genes can catch. In a study of 139 patients retested at a cancer genetics clinic, more than 1 in 6 who had no cancer-risk variant identified in their initial testing were found to carry one when retested. Insurance doesn’t always cover a second test. “There are probably thousands of individuals out there who need to be retested,” said Sofia Merajver of the University of Michigan.

Taking benzodiazepines like Xanax (alprazolam) or Klonopin (clonazepam) in the first trimester was not linked to a meaningful increase in major birth defects, according to a study of about 4.2 million U.S. pregnancies in Annals of Internal Medicine. After accounting for other differences between the groups, the risk of any major birth defect was essentially the same with and without the drugs. Researchers did find a small increase in digestive-tract malformations. About 2% of pregnancies on Medicaid had a benzodiazepine prescription filled in the first trimester.