- “Menopause should be treated as an accepted, recognized and respected rite of passage.” – Gillian Anderson
- Most of the problems reported, with the exception of hot flashes, were related to mental health.
- When you stop taking HRT, the beneficial effects on bones start to wear off immediately.
Menopause was previously seen as the shame of age. But it is a natural phase that marks the end of the fertile years. Now is the time to embrace menopause, he writes The Keeper.
As actress Gillian Anderson – who herself struggled with early menopause – once said: “Menopause should be treated as an accepted, recognized and respected rite of passage. And the results can be surprising; when your hormones are stable, your mood calms down and your periods are gone forever.
Women know more about helpful lifestyle changes – the importance of exercise and diet, for example. In recent years, GPs and patients have become much more informed about the science.
If you want to move into a better second half of life, action is needed when the ovaries stop producing eggs and estrogen hormones. This occurs at an average age of 51 in white women, and often earlier in Asian and black women, or those who experience early menopause. Chaos begins in perimenopause, usually in your 40s, but earlier for some, as estrogen hits unpredictable highs and lows.
Often this is the time when women suffer from insomnia, forget quickly, suffer from heart palpitations and unexplainable irritability. Progesterone promotes relaxation and helps us sleep; With low estrogen, serotonin (the “happy hormone”) also decreases. As the stress of caring for aging parents and irascible teenagers mounts, the hormones that kept us in balance disappear and antidepressant prescriptions starting to rise.
If the hot flashes haven’t started yet, confused women tend to blame the emotional outbursts or lack of concentration rather than their hormones. 85% of women experience hot flashes, but around half of them happen before their periods stop. They differ in frequency and intensity.
Hot flashes are visible and many women see them a lot in public. But we must understand the invisible effects of estrogen and progesterone and testosterone (which is also a female hormone) because they can contribute to an increased risk of osteoporosis, diabetes type 2, and cardiovascular disease. Research is ongoing on how a decrease in estrogen levels increases the risk of developing Alzheimer’s. Estrogen helps maintain bone density and improve cholesterol control, reducing the risk of fatty deposits in the arteries.
Women and some trans and non-binary people need to take this time to improve their health, including simple changes like exercising more, eating green foods, and finding ways to reduce stress. This is also the time to consider hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and find out which version may be safer for you when prescribed correctly (and it may (meaning seeing your doctor again to get the right dose, as every woman’s hormones are different). HRT doesn’t just get rid of symptoms, it can provide long-term health protection.
Menopause was historically seen as a loss of fertility – the term technically means 12 months after the last period – but now we understand it as a loss of hormones, which work in every part of the brain and body.
Along with growing medical research, in 2022 the Fawcett Society published Menopause and the Workplace, their study of a sample of 4,000 women in the UK aged 45-55, which provides revealing data. The most reported problems, with the exception of hot flashes, were related to mental health: 84% of women said they did not sleep or were tired, 73% had brain fog – memory loss, difficulty focused – and 69% had experienced anxiety or depression. . Headaches can also increase in perimenopause, caused by hormonal fluctuations.
Although this is a time in life when stress can build, which affects the ability to think clearly, hormonal loss can have a significant impact on a woman’s brain, and often so does their confidence in keeping a job. . Sudden memory lapses can be scary if they’re temporary – it’s no use retrieving a name or fact 10 minutes later if you’re in the middle of a meeting. While some men may suffer from memory problems in middle age, the impact on women appears to be more devastating: one in 10 women said they had left work because menopausal symptoms, and 28% had reduced their working hours, or left part of it. -time.
When we look at brain scans before and after menopause, the transition shows temporary chaos as the brain’s energy metabolism changes. The brain constantly relies on blood flow to fire on all cylinders, compensating for hormonal loss. But this takes time – hence the medium fog shift. Dr Lisa Mosconi, a neurologist at Weill Cornell, explains these changes – and what to do about them – in her new book, The Menopause Brain. “I like to say that menopause is a renewal project BRAIN“, explained Mosconi. “The brain has these neural connections that connect to the ovaries, but with menopause, not much of it is needed so it can be thrown away. And that continues to those brain changes that can manifest as vulnerability.” But it’s important to see this as a transitional phase, Mosconi said: the brain “regenerates itself so that a woman can move on. on to the next stage of her life.”
What about the body? In perimenopause, 44% of women surveyed experienced heavy periods (which are not reported enough in traditional medical literature), the “perimenopause tsunami”, which can sometimes last for more than a week. This can create serious problems at work, as the times are unpredictable.
Painful joints, arthritis and sports injuries often occur in menopause, as estrogen protects the joints and reduces inflammation, and 67% of women surveyed reported joint pain. This can be helped by HRT – a study of nearly 5,000 postmenopausal women showed that knee osteoarthritis was reduced by a third during treatment.
One in three women will suffer a fracture after the age of 50 – regular exercise for weight loss, a good diet and vitamin D can help. It turns out that low estrogen levels can overstimulate your heart , making it beat up to 16 times faster every minute.
Not enough has been written about sex at menopause and it turns out that 54% of women told Fawcett’s survey that they had “little or no interest in sex”. gender“. Local vaginal estrogen, in a dose low enough to be safe even for breast cancer patients, increases the overall pleasure of sex. We also learn about the vaginal microbiome, full of good lactobacillus bacteria. Estrogen helps by preventing urinary tract infections that affect 55% of postmenopausal women.
Then we come to a key piece of knowledge about menopause: As estrogen and testosterone disappear, bone breakdown exceeds formation, and women can experience bone loss of up to 20% in the 10 years after menopause. . With one in three women suffering a fracture after the age of 50, it is worth tackling this with regular exercise for weight, a good diet and vitamin D. But for women with a family history of osteoporosis, it has been shown that TSH above two years increasing the concentration level by 3% and up to 7% in the spine. When you stop taking HRT, the beneficial effects on bones start to wear off immediately, but the NHS now says “there is no fixed limit to how long you can to take HRT”.
There is a lot going on in the menopause space, and knowledge is power. Lifestyle changes will help most women overcome the hormonal upheaval after menopause. The reality on the ground is that most women of this age are already struggling – around 70% of women over 50 in the UK are overweight or obese, with all the health risks that includes, and antidepressant use is greatest for women between 50 years of age. -59 years. HRT can often be the first step to a healthier life. For many it is much more than that. Waking up every day with stable hormones and no menopausal symptoms is an amazing gift that this generation needs to put to good use.
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2024-05-11 09:06:34
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