How Heart Disease Risks Increase After the MenopauseDuring Menopause we change our body composition. We have less lean mass and we have more fat mass and part of that increase in fat mass is intra-abdominal fat. So before menopause, if you look at the risk of heart disease in women, its very low. And once they get to menopause, their heart disease risks sky rockets and actually catch up with men which have much higher risk in younger years.Intra-abdominal fat you think is one of the links between why women post-menopausally have higher heart disease risk.