(Painkillers don't work as well for women. Here's why.)

“People push through it, and it gets more inflamed,” explains Wittstein. “Pushing the range of motion is like putting oil on a fire, and it just gets worse.” Though there are treatments—usually oral or injected steroids along with physical therapy and home exercise—there’s no cure for the condition, which can last for months or years. Eventually, the shoulder will “thaw.” But in the meantime, the condition can range from inconvenient to agonizing.

Some people are more prone to the malady than others: those with diabetes, for example, and people of Asian descent, in whom frozen shoulder or shoulder pain and inflammation is the most prominent symptom of menopause, says Wittstein. In fact, in some Asian countries, it’s so common it’s known as “fifties shoulder” or “fifty-year shoulder.”

Estrogen loss and joint pain

As a woman ages, her ovaries make less estrogen—one of the most prominent hormones in women’s health—and with menopause, they cease estrogen and progesterone production altogether. That shift in sex hormones can affect everything from bone density to the heart and joints.

An estimated 50 percent or more of women experience arthralgia, or joint pain, during menopause. But estrogen’s effects on the musculoskeletal system are understudied and poorly understood—and there’s no comprehensive cure for menopause-related joint pain.

Frozen shoulder makes it difficult to stretch for pain relief, but ongoing research shows hormone therapy is a promising treatment.

In a bid to understand more, Ford and Wittstein compared shoulder symptoms in people undergoing menopausal hormone therapy and their counterparts who don’t boost their estrogen levels with medication. They conducted a retrospective study of 1,952 female patients between 45 and 60 years of age, analyzing their medical records for signs of menopause, use of hormone therapy, and frozen shoulder symptoms or diagnoses.

(Scientists are finally studying women's bodies. This is what they're learning.)

About 8 percent of the patients—152 of them—used hormone therapy. And those who didn’t use hormone therapy had 99 percent greater odds of receiving a frozen shoulder diagnosis than their counterparts who did.

The sample size was small, and the odds, though high, don’t reach statistical significance due to the study size, the physicians note. But after presenting their research to supportive colleagues at both the North American Menopause Society and the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine, they now plan to expand their research to a wider population.