Menopause: The Facts

Menopause: The Facts

     Menopause is a woman's reproductive system pension. You can't avoid it but you can delay it. Whether it will be carefree and happy or poor and desperate - much depends on you.
     Menopause is the beginning of new life, in which there is no place for dangerous days or premenstrual syndrome - the better life, one might think. Menopause brings suffering to others, which isn’t limited by our long-suffering souls (we are getting older). The whole body lives this period quite dramatically because women depend not on their husbands and bosses but their own hormone, estrogen. During these several decades when our ovaries carry estrogen carefully by the blood to every cell, our body gets used to it so much so that it can't imagine itself without it. Now it is not here any more, and you seem not to be a woman any longer. How to live? What to do? Despite the great amount of questions, menopause is not as awful as our imagination often pictures it.

Introduction
     According to the research, women start thinking about menopause as something real after they are thirty or thirty-five. There is the notion of neurosis in waiting for menopause, which even young ladies tend to experience; in fact, are you old when you are thirty? And more importantly, are you doomed to suffer from menopause? The possibility that you are not is quite large.
About 15% of women barely notice menopause, 55% have an average discomfort, and only the other 30% really suffer a lot. However, modern medicine has remedies to transfer women from the last group to the second and even to the first. But the most important thing to remember is that according to medical observation, the way that a woman treats menopause mostly determines its burden. The worse you imagine it to be, the crueler its response will be.
Women’s major fear, that when menstruation stops she stops being a woman, has no ground. Sexual appeal after menopause is not only not weakened but very often intensified. On the one hand, it is connected with greater sexual liberation - there is no fear of getting pregnant, and on the other hand, the amount of androgens, which are produced by adrenals and are responsible for our sexual desire, is increased. Yes, the vaginal lubricants decrease and this causes some problems, but they are most easily solved with the help of lubricants from a sex shop. By the way, every modern woman should get to know what lubricants are long before the beginning of menopause, because even when we are young, there are periods when mucous is not enough and this makes sex quite unpleasant.

There exists one more problem; when menopause starts, we cannot bear children any longer, but on the one hand, how long can we continue to do it? And on the other, with the help of artificial fertilization and special hormone therapy, those who wish to can make up for lost time even in this process.

During menopause, our skin gets drier and more wrinkles appear; before menopause, we slowly approach old age, but when it comes, we move more quickly. Yet modern cosmetics and substitution hormone therapy are ready to cope with it. Especially since some estrogen is still produced in adipose tissue.

Menopause step by step

     The average age of menopause for a women is 52 years old. However, this doesn't really mean that all women come to this age with functioning ovaries; in reality, menopause can start between 40 and 55 years old, and 40 and 55 are two completely different ages. Second, menopause actually starts some years before menstruation stops. Menopause is quite a long process that can be split into three stages:

     Stage 1. Premenopause. It lasts from two to ten years. This is the period when the body starts getting used to the diminishing of estrogen, which often causes climacteric syndrome. These are the symptoms: the sudden feeling of fever in the upper part of the body and head, the increased hot flashes, aggression, irritability, heart intermissions. Menstrual cycle imbalance starts. Only 5% of women experience a sudden stop of menstruation. Most women have longer intervals between menstruations and a smaller amount of vaginal discharge. On the contrary, one third of women have abundantly rich or long-lasting menstruations.
     Stage 2. Menopause. Officially it starts not earlier than a year after menstruation stops.

     Stage 3. 6-8 years after menopause. At this stage, the process of getting old accelerates. Two or three years after the last drop of menstrual blood, changes take place such as mucous dryness causing vaginal itching. The elasticity of skin gets sharply lower. In five years, belated metabolic imbalance appears: atherosclerosis, osteoporosis, infarction, stroke, fractures and other age-specific “pleasures".

When you should wait for it

     The time when menopause starts is determined beforehand by the set of genes from our parents, especially the mother. Unlike the pathological state which is called ovary exhaustion syndrome, when menstruation stops at 35-36 and premature menopause at 39, the so-called early menopause (with menopause at 40-44 years old) is just a variant of the norm. However, scientists from all over the world have recently raised the alarm - menopause is starting earlier.
Yet the very same scientists have come to this conclusion: Time X for every woman is not exactly a dead stop but a period of some years. In favorable conditions, menopause starts at the end of this period; in unfavorable, at the beginning. The difference can reach 5 years or even more! And if so, it is true that if we take certain measures, we can, if not put menopause off, at least not precipitate it.

Latest remedy

     Nowadays in the US and Western European countries, about 85% of women of menopausal age take hormones, and though in Russia this figure is not more than 1%, this doesn't mean that substitution hormone therapy has doubtful advantages. The level of menopause tolerance greatly depends on the ovary fading speed, and this is determined genetically. The quicker the amount of estrogen diminishes, the less time the body has to get used to the new situation, and the more difficult the effects of menopause are.

     The use of substitution hormone therapy helps to make this process more gradual, softer, and easier. What's more, if you start such treatment in the period of pre-menopause, you can postpone the beginning of menopause for five years and even more. The use of substitution hormone therapy in the period after menstruation stops helps to make this period of life more comfortable and to make the following problems easier.

Hormones are often prescribed to women whose menstruation has completely stopped. It has been exactly proven that the use of substitution hormone therapy reduces myocardial infarction frequency by 36-50%, stroke frequency by 40%, and cervical hip fracture frequency (the result of osteoporosis) by 50%. Most importantly though, the use of substitution hormone therapy during the whole menopausal period helps us to remain young, attractive, and what is also of no small account - efficient much longer.