Postmenopausal women may develop full thickness rotator cuff tears and not know it.
In a study of pre- and postmenopausal women, investigators from Italy found a nearly three-fold increase in asymptomatic rotator cuff full-thickness tears in the older women.
“Because asymptomatic tears have a great potential to evolve into symptomatic painful shoulder, a precocious discovery of this pathology may allow the planning of preventive and therapeutic measures,” they point out in a report online June 10 in Menopause.
Rotator cuff tendon tears increase with age, but no study until now has specifically addressed prevalence changes in women from premenopause to postmenopause.