The above subject" Menopause" is going to be covered in a number of posts in the coming weeks. I hope you enjoy and learn something useful from them.
Part One:-
What is it? There is even a musical on menopause and I hope some of you have seen it and enjoyed it. I often wonder along with other scientific people is it a disease or just a phase in a woman's life. Woman's sex gland the ovary which you may have read in previous posts is quite magical, and it changes the face of our lives. We are like little girls, then as we grow we become pubertal, menstruation starts, we become fertile and a few years later fertility is taken away from us and even the periods disappear, and then we are called menopausal. The time before the period stops has varying activity in our body and it is called pre, peri, post menopausal. It generally takes up to seven years for us to stop the periods completely. In the past this referred to Climacteric (A Greek word meaning seven).
It is called menopause when we have no periods for twelve months after the last period.
Each women's experience is unique in their own way during this time, hence the diagnosis is difficult to make.
Menopause has suddenly become like an epidemic, but this is probably due to our increased life expectancy and our desire to be healthy and happy during our menopausal years.
In 1900 the average life expectancy of a woman was 50 years, which is a very short life span after menopause, as Aristotle estimated the age of menopause was 40 years, so we had hardly any years left to live after menopause, however now in the world, several million women join the menopause club each year.
According to the World Health Statistics a girl born in 2014 is expected to live for an average of 73 years. Japanese women live the longest. The divide between the rich and the poor countries is still there, and in the rich countries the women live 7 years longer, and this is because they have the access to all the modern medical facilities that the women in the poorer countries do not have.
Therefore it is not surprising that wherever you go, be it a luncheon, a dinner party, a function or any gathering, middle aged women in their forties discuss menopause, what is it,can it be prevented, what we need to do about it, what is the treatment for it, medical or natural.
A few years ago I went home to India where my mother's cook said to me "That she needs treatment for malaria, as she gets high temperature , and sweating, the treatment for malaria that the doctors are using is not helping me". Obviously she was menopausal having hot flashes and sweating which is the most common and distressing symptom of menopause. The modern treatment of HRT fixed her.
The attention paid to menopause is not new, as it started to be looked at in the 1930's by a French doctor who wrote one of the first books on menopause and he called it "The Problem as Menopause".
They called it the deficiency disease and they started to give extract of crushed ovaries and an extract from the amniotic fluid of cattle.
They also gave testicular extract and a product called Emmerin was prepared from pregnant women's urine and this was found to be useful.
In 1930 a German scientist Dr Zondek prepared an extract from the urine of a pregnant mare which was much cheaper than Emmerin and so it continued to be used.
Synthetic oestrogen was developed in 1938 and progesterone in 1937 and thus medicalization of menopause started.
