Archive for the 'Menopause' Category

Early Menopause Triggers

Early or premature menopause is one that occurs before a woman is 40, whether it is natural or induced. The symptoms are similar to those of natural menopause – hot flashes, sleep problems, feeling emotionally upset, dryness of the vagina and often a loss of interest in sex. They can range from hardly noticeable to debilitating.

Women in premature menopause have an increased risk of bone breakage due to osteoporosis as their bones get start getting thinner earlier.

Let’s look at why premature menopause can happen:

CHROMOSOME DEFECTS:

Women with Turner’s syndrome have no second X chromosome or they may be born without a part of it. This means that their ovaries don’t develop properly and the result is a premature menopause.

GENETICS:

If a percentage of the women in your family have stopped their monthly periods early in life, it’s possible that you may too.

AUTOIMMUNE DISEASES:

In autoimmune diseases, like Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis or rheumatoid arthritis, the body’s immune system goes haywire. It’s there to protect the body and fight off disease but it can mistakenly attack the body instead. If it attacks the reproductive system it may damage the ovaries and affect the correct production of female hormones.

If a woman has surgery to remove both her ovaries (a bilateral oophorectomy) she will immediately go into a menopause. Her periods will stop and hormone production will plummet. She may start to experience menopausal symptoms right away. These women are offered MHT – menopause hormone therapy.

If a woman has an hysterectomy but is left with one or both ovaries, she won’t have a premature menopause, as hormone production can continue. As there is no longer a uterus, she will not have any more periods and cannot become pregnant. Rarely, hot flashes may occur but this is due to the blood supply being disturbed during surgery, and not to hormones. These women may have their natural menopause brought forward by a year or two.

Some cancer treatments, including some forms of chemotherapy and radiotherapy to the pelvic area, may damage the ovaries. If damage occurs, the woman’s periods may stop, she may have problems with future fertility or become infertile altogether. This can be immediate or may take several months to occur.

The risks of entering early menopause depend on which type of chemotherapy is given, how much of it was used and how old the woman is when she receives the treatment. As a general rule, the younger a women is the less likely she is to go into a premature menopause.

HOW WILL I KNOW IF I’M IN PREMATURE MENOPAUSE?

If you’re under the age of 40 and suffering any menopausal symptoms, see your doctor. In suspected early menopause, blood tests will be needed to make a true diagnosis.

You may be given a blood test that measures follicle-stimulating hormone or FSH. This is the hormone that ovaries use to make estrogen, so when levels of FSH rise, it indicates that the ovaries are no longer making it. A higher than normal level of FSH would show that you are in menopause – but as estrogen levels vary from day to day, you may need to have this test repeated more than once for a definite diagnosis.

You may also have blood tests for estradiol (a kind of estrogen) and luetinizing hormone (LH). When the ovaries fail, estradiol levels go down, so a lower than normal level would show that you are in menopause. Luetinizing hormone triggers ovulation and if levels of it are higher than normal, the diagnosis will be that you’ve gone through menopause.

Menopause Understanding the Facts

Menopause, like puberty, is an inevitable part of a womans life. It is the end of the menstruation period, which in turn signals a great deal of changes. In the middle part of your thirties, there are changes that will happen to your ovaries. These changes include fluctuations in progesterone and estrogen levels. These hormones are very important to have normal menstrual cycles and successful pregnancies. Estrogen works at keeping a womans bones healthy. It could also have an effect on the levels of cholesterol in the blood and helps in retaining good memory and in sustaining the elasticity of the arteries and the skin.

Although it is very rare for menopause to happen before a woman is in her forties, it could occur anytime starting in her mid-thirties to mid-fifties. There also women who go through menopause at a much later stage in their life. It has been noted that women who smoked and by those who underwent hysterectomy, cancer therapy, or premature ovarian failure experience early menopause.

The time when changes happen in a womans body right before menopause is called perimenopause and could be experienced as early as her thirties.

What are the Common Menopausal Signs?

Each and every woman may undergo different changes when they go through the menopausal period. The change in their hormones can lead to different symptoms that could last from several months to a number of years and sometimes longer. While some women might experience slight discomfort because of these symptoms, some may have them more severe. There are also others who have less trouble or none at all.

These are among the common symptoms:

* Hot flashes. This is characterized by a sudden rush of heat in the bodys upper extremities

* Change in the menstrual cycle. This could be noted when periods become irregular or when having a lighter or heavier flow. There are even others who may bleed heavily for a great number of days. Periods may also come more frequently and for more number of days. There could also be some spotting in between menstrual cycles.

* Bladder and vaginal problems. These could be in the form of itching, dryness and burning in the vagina, urinary tract infections, incontinence, or vaginal infections.

* Change in libido. This is very common in women going through menopause and is usually caused by the vaginal dryness.

* Mood swings. This is because of the link between a womans hormonal balance and her moods.

* Problems with sleeping. These are usually in the form of waking up early or not being able to sleep at all.

Ailments during Menopause

The two most common ailments associated with menopause are heart disease and osteoporosis.

* Heart disease. The change in the estrogen levels in a womans body could cause this as well as the aging process. This could be linked with other problems like weight gain and high blood pressure.

* Osteoporosis. The slow production of estrogen during menopause could lead to the weakening and the easy breakage of the bones. This can be reduced by comsuming a diet that is rich in vitamin D and calcium and by doing some weight-bearing exercises.

How Menopause Became A Pharmaceutical Royal Flush

The medicalization of menopause is a process that has subtly been going on since the 1930′s, although it wasn’t until the 1960′s that it really picked up momentum in the public eye. This medicalization has transformed the understanding of what is a natural process, into one defined as a disease.

When you define something as a disease, then treatment becomes compulsory. And the implication is that if you don’t get treatment, or what is defined as acceptable treatment, then you are being irresponsible and negligent in your own health. Women’s menopausal experiences were for a long time dismissed as the product of their own imaginations, then later embraced by pharmaceutical companies and subverted to push their shiny new pills.

And given that HRT has been so widely taken up by women, and is still used despite its risks, it has been a successful approach by the drug companies.

The celebrity factor in promotional campaigns has been very effective at selling both the idea of menopause as a disease, and the promises of hormone replacement therapy. The FDA and their comparative bodies in most countries require that product claims are verified by appropriate and legitimate studies. But celebrities in interviews are not subject to those rules, which are designed to protect the public from misleading and harmful information. So when an actress or aging supermodel enthusiastically enacts the lines of the drug company’s scripts – that menopause is fraught with risks of diseases like alzheimers, heart attacks, colon cancer, cataracts, teeth loss, bone fractures and more (p43), in the guise of ‘education’ and personal sharing, this is seen as legitimate. There is no reference to the fees they were paid for this work, the source of their information, or its scientific validity (or lack thereof). Nor is their any mention of the fact that even initially, though there were short term benefits, the long term effects of hormone replacement therapy were not known. These celebrities were either ignorant themselves of their own status as human guinea pigs, or didn’t care.

Menopause is sold with the language of ‘decline’, as though once a woman’s estrogen ‘dried up’, so did she. She was relegated to an image of being ‘less’ than she was before, with the implication being that her value and contributions as a person were defined by something that time would take away. Unless of course she accepted the ‘help’ of the drug companies with their ‘medicine’ for her newly defined ‘disease’. So instead of being supported as her body moved into another phase of its life, women were basically told they were losing what defined them as ‘women’, as though one hormone was responsible for what made them unique individuals. As though femininity was characterized not by their own choices and expressions, but driven by hormones. And as though ‘femininity’ was equated with youth, and that once this passed, women would not enjoy their ‘best years’ as they would otherwise. And, of course, if a woman wasn’t feminine, in the appropriately defined way, then she was not really a woman…

Add to this mix the spectre of diseases that women would supposedly be in greater danger of getting, despite the fact that if scientists really knew the single cause of these diseases they would have triumphantly been marketing the cure to everyone – regardless of gender. When doctors treat alzheimers, heart attacks, colon caner, cataracts and teeth loss, they do not have one treatment for men and one for women. And in most cases, they don’t guarantee a cure with their treatments anyway. So this suggests not only do they not have the cure, but they don’t fully understand the cause. The murky waters of risk assessment are both complex and already muddied.

Women were given estrogen only in the early years of medical promotion. As studies emerged which showed women taking estrogen were more at risk of developing endometrial cancer, progestogen or progestin was added to form the combined hormone replacement therapy that became known as HRT. It was advertised for a long time as reducing the risk of heart disease, amongst other things. But in 1998, a high quality study, the HERS trial, found that in the group of 3000 older women they were studying over 4 years, who all had some form of heart disease, those on HRT were not in fact protected from heart attacks after all. And during the first year of the study, there was a higher incidence of heart attacks in the women on HRT compared with the placebo group. This was completely the opposite of what the drug companies had been advertising, based on their own observational studies, as opposed to the randomized control trial that the HERS study was.

The HERS trial was not the only one that would raise some niggly little facts about the menopause gravy train.

References: R Moynihan & A Cassels, Selling Sickness – How Drug Companies are Turning Us All Into Patients (Allen & Unwin, 2005)