What are the Greene Climacteric Scale and the Menopause Rating Scale?

The Greene Climacteric Scale

Developed by Dr John Greene, working with a menopause clinic in Glasgow. The original factor-analytic work was published in 1976, and the standard version came in a 1998 paper in Maturitas. It has 21 items covering psychological symptoms (anxiety and low mood), somatic symptoms, vasomotor symptoms, and a sexuality item. Respondents rate each on a four-point scale and the items are summed.

The NIH-funded PhenX Toolkit publishes it as a standard measurement protocol, which is a reasonable sign of how established it is in research use.

The Menopause Rating Scale

Developed in Germany in the early 1990s, originally administered by a physician and later revised to be self-administered. It has 11 items across three subscales — psychological, somato-vegetative and urogenital — each rated 0 (no complaints) to 4 (very severe). It has been translated into more than 25 languages. The methodological review in Health and Quality of Life Outcomes is the standard reference.

What a score can and cannot tell you

Both instruments produce a total score, and published papers describe severity bands derived from research populations. It is tempting to read your own number against those bands and conclude something. Please don't, and we won't help you to.

Here is why. A score is a summary of what you reported on a particular day. It is not a diagnosis, it is not a measurement of hormone levels, and the reference ranges come from the specific populations those instruments were standardised on — which may not resemble you. Interpreting a score in the context of your history is clinical work, and it belongs with a clinician.

What a score is genuinely good for is comparison with your own earlier scores. If the same 11 or 21 questions, asked the same way, produce a different total in March than in January, something has changed. That is a real and useful signal, and it is the honest reason to use a standardised instrument rather than a free-text diary.

A note on licensing

Both instruments are the intellectual property of their developers. The Greene Climacteric Scale is administered under permission, and the Menopause Rating Scale is free for non-commercial use with a licence required for commercial use. We mention this because it matters for what any app can legitimately include, and because we would rather be transparent about it than quietly imply otherwise.

The gap this sits in

A 2023 review of 28 menopause apps in BMC Women's Health found that none had been formally evaluated using validated menopause symptom scales, and that most lacked any mechanism for sharing data with a healthcare provider or exporting a structured record for clinical use. The same review found average readability sat at around a college-graduate reading level, and that a third of the apps indicated third-party data sharing.