Blog of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research

Menstrual Moments in Modelland

January 25th, 2012 by Elizabeth Kissling

Guest Post by Jaime Hough

 

Tyra Banks wrote a young adult fantsy novel. And it’s a NYT bestseller. The book, titled Modelland, is about the journey of one awkward-looking girl who is whisked away to a magical boarding school which trains girls to become supermodels with superpowers, known as Intoxibellas. It’s kind of like Harry Potter, if Harry Potter revolved around modeling and was a battle between conventional and unconventional beauty rather than good and evil.

But I’m probably making it sound bad and it’s not, really. Modelland is the story of Tookie de la Crème,1 a girl unnoticed by her classmates and mostly ignored by her family, whose life is turned upside down when she is recruited for Modelland. The reader follows Tookie to and through her first year at Modelland as she, along dozens of other girls, trains for the chance to become one of seven Intoxibellas, supermodels with superpowers, in her graduating class. At Modelland Tookie makes her first real friends while becoming embroiled in a mystery involving the school’s headmistress, known as the BellaDonna, and the world’s mysteriously missing foremost supermodel, Ci~L.2

I read Modelland because I was curious and because I have long been fascinated by the public persona of Tyra Banks. What can I say? We all have our guilty pleasures. Most of Modelland is, for the most part, what you would expect, especially if you’re familiar with Tyra’s moneymaker, America’s Next Top Model. However, I was completely surprised by the fact that Banks chose to use menstruation as a key plot device to develop Tookie’s character. Below are excerpts from the book dealing with menstruation and my brief analysis of how these menstrual moments [MMs] function in the novel and could potentially function for the intended reader.

 

MM1: Not Yet A Woman

Menstrual Moment One comes near the beginning of the book when Tookie has just come home from her day at school and the readers are being introduced to her dysfunctional family. In particular, we’ve just met Tookie’s younger, dumb blonde little sister, Myrracle.

“Don’t laugh at me!” Myrracle said, frustrated. “I’m on my periodical right now! It makes me forgetful!”

“It’s period, not periodical!” Tookie growled.

Myrracle smirked. “How do you know? You haven’t even gotten yours yet!”

Tookie turned away, her face flooded with heat. Myrracle never resisted the urge to reminder her that she had gotten her period already, even though she was two years younger.3

 

MM2: Menarche

In Menstrual Moment Two Tookie has just spent her first night at Modelland and is about to start her first day of classes. We follow her as she prepares for class.

 

Disoriented, Tookie stumbled into the large, sterile-looking community bathroom. As she did, a dull pain shot through her legs, hips, and stomach. She doubled over, feeling as though she was about to vomit. Perfect, she though. I’m sick on the first day of school. . .All at once , every single girl in the bathroom doubled over in pain, gripping her stomach and back just as Tookie had. . .Tookie shut her eyes, wincing again with another pain. “Piper, my back and tummy are killing me!” she whispered.

Piper shrugged. “Join the club, Tookie. Every new Bella started menstruating at the exact same time this morning.”

“Wait. What?

“You’ve never heard of menstrual synchrony, or the dormitory effect?” Piper asked. “Menstrual synchrony is a theory that suggest that the menstruation cycles of women who cohabitate-think army barracks, female penitentiaries, convents, and university dormitories—synchronize over time. It usually takes months for the alignment to occur but her at Modelland, it seems to have happened in twenty-four hours.”

Searching for Menopause Blogs

January 6th, 2012 by Heather Dillaway

Lately re:Cycling has featured several posts on menopause, and I have begun to think about the other menopause blogs that might be out there. Turns out there are plenty – maybe not as many blogs as there are about reproductive experiences like pregnancy or childbirth but still a lot. There are even blogs that compile info on menopause blogs such as Menopause the Blog.

Blog Series 13 by Richard Smith // CC BY-NC 2.0

If you start searching for these blogs it becomes clear that many talk about hot flashes as a major sign or symptom of menopause (or perimenopause), and offer either strictly biomedical or more natural/alternative remedies for signs or symptoms (e.g., Menopause Symptom Report or I Hate Menopause). Other blogs are written primarily for their comedic value (e.g., Menopause Maniac), support value (e.g., Menopause Goddess Blog), or purely informational value (e.g., Menopause the Blog). (Menopause the Blog does a good job of summarizing some of the major blogs out there, just FYI for those who are interested.)

Many of these menopause blogs conflate the menopause transition with midlife in general (you only have to read a few blog entries to know that women talk as much about the bad and good of midlife as a life stage as they talk about menopause) but some are very specific to menopause. I find it very interesting that there can be so many different kinds of menopause blogs. I also find it interesting that so many of these menopause blogs seem to be trying to work out what midlife as a life stage means as well, which resonates with Paula Derry’s earlier post this week about how little we know about women’s midlife in general.

Perhaps what interests me the most, however, is that all of these menopause blogs seem to be either aligning with or struggling against very negative definitions of menopause. Based on my quick perusal, no blog seems to have moved past or risen above the constant negotiation of biomedical definitions. Even if bloggers are writing about how happy they are at menopause or how much they’ve learned about themselves at this life stage, blog entries still seem to be written in response to negative definitions (or at the very least, in response to the ghosts of negative definitions that still hang around menopause even when it is defined more positively).

To me this means that researchers Antonia Lyons and Christine Griffin are correct in proposing that there is only one “master narrative” of menopause and that women, doctors, women’s partners and children, medical institutions, workplaces, strangers, women’s friends, etc., have no choice but to deal with this master narrative in some way.  This also means that Abbey Hyde and her co-authors are correct in asserting that even when women aren’t using biomedical definitions to describe their menopause transition, these definitions still shape women’s perceptions of their experiences.

So, my question is, have others read these menopause blogs? And if so, does anyone have a different take on these blogs? Perhaps I’m being too harsh and using a very specific lens to look at these varied blogs. But perhaps not. What then? If you agree with me, is this what blogs are ultimately supposed to be in the end – a response (be it direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious) to the master narratives in our lives?

 

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Making Money from Menopause

January 3rd, 2012 by David Linton

 

No, I don’t mean all those drugs aimed at relieving the “symptoms” associated with the hormonal shifts that sometimes trigger a variety of physical or mood changes nor even the expenses that accompany joining a Red Hat Society (somebody’s making a little change on that flashy head wear!).

Rather, it’s the way Gennifer Flowers has packaged herself following her brief brush with fame as a participant in one of President Bill Clinton’s sex scandals.  A recent NY Times op-ed piece by Gail Collins (December 7, 2011) informs us that Flowers is now working as an entertainer and motivational speaker and that one of her favorite topics is “The ‘M’ Years . . . Surviving Menopause Mania!”  And, indeed, a visit to the Gennifer Flowers web site reveals that her talk “is a humorously-presented speech about the experiences of menopause while giving very current and important medically documented information to women on how to get through these ‘M’ years with the greatest of ease and dignity.”

Unfortunately, the site does not explain just what makes menopause (we presume she means perimenopause) worthy of being called “Mania!” – with an exclamation, no less – nor what makes it so daunting that one needs advice on how to “survive” nor why she feels it’s necessary to be coy with that use of “M” as some sort of code.  But perhaps it’s those unknowns that make one want to pay the fee and invite her to one’s event.

The site also includes a lot of glamorous photos and some teasing references to her other favorite topic, “Surviving Sex, Power and Propaganda.”  There’s that notion of surviving again.  But surviving sex?  There’s something touchingly sad about that.

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On Menopause Definitions

December 28th, 2011 by Elizabeth Kissling

Guest Post by Paula S. Derry, Ph.D.

In a recent blog post, Heather Dillaway commented on the uncertainty, confusion, and frustration she felt as a menopause researcher, given the lack of consensus about the most basic aspects of the menopause transition. Researchers don’t agree about their definitions, and can’t even agree on what needs to be defined. She asked for reactions to her entry; I’ve found that my reaction has grown into this separate post.

Fire in the Head by Beate Knappe // CC 2.0

I, unlike Heather, am not a sociologist. I’m a health psychologist. My training and current work include analyzing, critiquing, and making sense of experimental research and theories. I have also developed workshops for community women and for professionals whose aim is to provide health-promoting information and decision-making heuristics. I have given a lot of thought to the issues that Heather raises, and this is as far as I’ve gotten with them.

To me, there are many layers of issues involved. The first is the fact that the science — about the physiology of menopause and the processes leading up to it — is limited and incomplete. Part of the reason that professionals disagree about whether the life course of menstruation has five stages or seven, or why women have hot flashes, or even why women have a menopause, is that we don’t actually know. We simply do not have the scientific facts. We don’t understand what the underlying process is or how it works. Given this uncertainty, professionals must make judgments about how to define terms and what their hypotheses (or best guesses) are about underlying processes. A second fact, along with our limited real knowledge, is the tenacity with which professionals assert their judgments and argue against competing views. People disagree and they hold strongly to their positions—about language and the facts. To me, it makes sense to have definitions of stages of menstrual life that are objective and easily measurable (like the STRAW staging system) for researchers who need to compare results with each other. It doesn’t make sense to assert that this system, based on expert opinion and not on experimental facts, actually defines when a particular stage really “begins.” It makes sense to say that experimental research supports the idea that changes in the thermoregulatory center of the hypothalamus are important processes if you’re trying to understand hot flashes.  It does not make sense to conclude that these brain changes in themselves explain hot flashes; other factors must also be involved.

I think another source of confusion is that menopause is not one thing, but many. It is a circumscribed biological change (lack of periods and what leads up to them physiologically) and also a psychosociocultural matter. We have a term for when girls begin to menstruate (menarche), a separate term for the larger biological changes of which menarche is a part (puberty), and another term for the biopsychosociocultural changes of which puberty is a part (adolescence). I think these kinds of distinctions are confused with regard to understanding menopause in part because there is cultural confusion about midlife (or mature adulthood or whatever term you use) as a life stage.  There is no cultural consensus about this stage of life.  And, indeed, this isn’t surprising.  Some women are planning retirement while others are training for a new job or career.  Some are grandmothers while others are raising a young child.  My opinion, also, is that we as a culture have a paucity of concepts of mature, responsible adulthood and what it means.

Everything you need to know about the menstrual cycle in less than 3000 words

December 26th, 2011 by Chris Bobel

The Research Pile by Krista Kennedy // CC 2.0

What happens when get a bunch of interdisciplinary menstrual cycle researchers together and give them each a topic or two and a word count?

 

You get a pithy document called “The Menstrual Cycle: A Feminist Lifespan Perspective” available to anyone who needs to put their finger on the state of menstrual cycle research today. Readers of re:Cycling know there is deep complexity swirling around the menstrual cycle (indeed, that’s why this blog exists!)  so it sure is helpful to have a resource that collects the key info in one tidy place.

The Fact Sheet –four pages of content and two pages of must-have references—was collaboratively written by a team of members of the Society for Menstrual Research. It is available for download here [pdf]. Sections include menstrual attitudes and representations, menarche, peri/menopause, menstrual care, problems associated with menstruation and more. Something for everybody.

 

The Fact Sheet is commissioned and published by Sociologists for Women and Society (SWS), who, since 2002, has been publishing several fact sheets each year on topics ranging from Women & Size to Title IX to Women, Poverty and Welfare Reform. These resources are immensely helpful to scores of folks—teachers, activists, clinicians, the interminably curious—anyone , really, who needs concise accurate info.

 

Impress your friends. Go grab the Fact Sheet!

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How do YOU define reproductive health?

December 8th, 2011 by Heather Dillaway

By Justine Siegemundin, 1723. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Menstruation and menopause are reproductive health experiences, aren’t they? At least that’s what I think. But I’m starting to wonder how many people agree. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how people define the things they experience and how researchers define the things they research. The last blog entry I wrote was on the confusing and frustrating definitions of the menopause transition. Today I thought I’d zoom out a bit more and think about what “reproduction” and/or “reproductive health” means. I personally think of reproductive health as encompassing a woman’s entire life course and including a whole range of experiences (and the pursuit and achievement of individual wellbeing throughout all of these experiences) but I don’t know if others do. For instance, about two weeks ago I was on the phone with a potential coauthor, and she and I had a misunderstanding because I was talking about “reproductive health” as including prevention of HIV and other STDs and she was thinking of “reproductive health” as just about conception, pregnancy, and birth.  I’ve been studying what I think of as women’s normal reproductive processes and experiences (e.g., menopause, menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding) for a long time, so I thought I would use this blog entry to tell readers what I think about “reproductive health” and see if anyone agrees with me.

Adrienne Rich, in her 1986 edition of Of Woman Born, proposes that biological reproduction has been defined narrowly by most people (feminist or otherwise). Thus, for many, “reproduction” is equated with just two female processes: pregnancy and childbirth.  While it may not have been the goal of any one person to define reproduction so narrowly, this seems to be a reality.  At various points throughout history, conception and contraception – at times, even abortion – have been added to the definition of what “reproduction” meant, or what “reproductive rights” women were owed, but “reproduction” and “reproductive health” still refers to a very short list of experiences.

I believe we should acknowledge, however, that women’s “reproductive” experiences include more than just conception, contraception, pregnancy, and birth. Reproduction includes an entire range of reproductive experiences, including: menstruation and menopause, use of and problems with contraceptives, choosing whether to become a mother/father, breastfeeding, HIV and other sexually-transmitted diseases/infections, prostate and breast cancer, awareness of and access to reproductive health care, protection against sterilization abuse, vasectomy and hysterectomy experiences, the rights of single and/or lesbian mothers, the rights of single and/or gay fathers, donor insemination, cloning and other new advancements in reproductive technology, adoption, infertility treatments and experiences, gynecological practices, alternative reproductive health movements, decisions over whether to engage in heterosexual intercourse, and making informed “choices” in any of these instances. This is just a partial list, and I could go on and on. I propose that we think of “reproduction” (and, by default, “reproductive health” experiences) as the collection of (a) biological, physiological and/or embodied processes and (b) emotional, social, economic, and political decisions and/or actions that individuals — along with their families and other social groups — participate in (either voluntarily or sometimes through some sort of coercion), as they transition in and out of certain stages of their life course, decide whether or not to be sexually-active, and/or decide whether or not to become genetic, gestational and/or social “parents” or caregivers of children.  Any one reproductive experience – for example, menstruation or menopause – can also really be a set of processes and decisions and actions that women make/take/experience/pass through over an indefinite period of time – usually not happening in just one moment. Thus, menstruation or menopause are full-fledged and complicated reproductive experiences in and of themselves, as much as pregnancy or childbirth or any other “reproductive” experiences are, that the majority of women pass through, albeit in different ways, throughout their lifetimes. So are all of the other processes and experiences I’ve named above, and more I haven’t named. “Reproductive health” would then refer to a state of physical and mental wellbeing, indeed biopsychosocial wellbeing, while experiencing any of these sets of processes or decisions or actions.

Earlier menopause with ovary-saving hysterectomy

November 22nd, 2011 by Chris Hitchcock

Recently Heather Dillaway blogged about the challenges and frustrations of naming, and this blog continues with that theme, looking at a recent article about increased rates of ”ovarian failure” following ovary-preserving hysterectomy.

Ovary-saving hysterectomy linked to early menopause,” reads the USA Today on-line headline, and the article opens with the statement that:

Younger women who have a hysterectomy that spares the ovaries are almost twice as likely to go through early menopause as women who do not have their uteruses removed, according to a new study. 

It’s an alarming statement, and one likely to alarm an already anxious woman. The study in question was a longitudinal study following 406 women aged 30-47 at the time of their surgery and a control group of 465 similar-aged women who did not have a hysterectomy. The study will be published in the December 2011 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, and the news coverage was drawn from the Duke University press release, entitled “Hysterectomy Increases Risk for Earlier Menopause In Younger Women”.

The first challenge of naming is in the subtle difference between the press release’s earlier menopause, and the USA today article’s early menopause. Early menopause is defined as menopause that occurs before the age of 40; the earlier menopause in the article is a difference of about 2 years — an important difference.

In women who no longer have menstrual flow, how did the authors establish menopausal status, or ”ovarian failure”, as they called it? In women with a uterus, menstrual flow is a convenient landmark, which is roughly aligned with the hormonal changes to decide when menopause (or is it post-menopause?) has begun. We assume that 12 months without menstrual flow likely means that there will be no further flow (although that is not always true), and that it is a good estimate of when ovarian hormonal cycles have stopped. In this article, the authors used an annual blood sample to measure a hormone called FSH (follicular stimulating hormone). FSH is high in menopausal women, and an FSH>40 IU/L was used as a criterion for reaching menopause. However, we have known since 1994 that a high FSH level is not diagnostic of menopause, and, indeed, 6 of the 504 women were excluded because they had a baseline FSH > 40 IU/L, despite having menstruated within the previous three months. Regularly cycling women in their 40′s can have high FSH levels, and later have low FSH levels and ovulatory cycles. In menstruating women, blood samples would also be timed, which is not possible for women who don’t menstruate. It would be interesting to know how the high FSH criterion corresponded to menstrual cycle history in the control group.

Studies like this are hard to do. The authors were careful — they enrolled women prior to surgery and followed control women in the same way. To get 403 women with complete data, they started with over 900 women.  The controls were fairly well matched — similar in age, age at first period, c-section and oral contraceptive history. However, women undergoing surgery were more likely to have had at least one full-term pregnancy (84.5% vs 68.3% in controls), and more likely to have had a previous tubal ligation. In addition, fibroids, endometriosis, ovarian cysts and previous surgery for fibroids were more common in those having a hysterectomy. Both the hysterectomy itself and the history of previous surgery, particularly tubal ligation, may also contribute to a difference between the two groups. Finally, women with hysterectomy were heavier than the control group.

Feeling Uncertainty, Confusion, and Frustration about Menopause

November 10th, 2011 by Heather Dillaway

Last Friday I attended a conference on autoethnography and was privileged enough to listen to Carolyn Ellis give the keynote speech on this new and upcoming qualitative methodology.  Sitting there and listening to Ellis talk about the need for all of us to be reflexive and put ourselves into our research projects, I realized that I probably do need to acknowledge my own feelings of uncertainty and frustration as I study menopause and midlife. Therefore, this blog entry is for you, Carolyn Ellis, as I am inspired by you to be better from now on about acknowledging the connections between me and my work and trying to understand myself as a research instrument as I seek to understand menopause and midlife better.

The reasons I really started studying menopause are the very reasons why I’m still studying it but also frustrated by it. In the mid to late 1990s, my experiences as a birth control counselor at Planned Parenthood in Delaware and Michigan led me to realize that plenty of middle-aged women don’t understand what’s happening to them when they start to have irregular periods in perimenopause. I also watched my mother begin perimenopause in the mid 1990s and be confused and embarrassed to talk about the experience when she had always been the first one who always wanted to talk about pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and birth control (“What was so confusing about menopause?,” I thought).  I’ve now formally studied and written about women’s thoughts and experiences of menopause since 1999. All along, the terminology and definitions of menopause have been as problematic for me as for the women I’ve studied. I’ve listened to menopausal women who tell me that they are completely confused about biomedical terminology for their life stage and completely baffled about what they’re going through.  I’ve heard them talk about how doctors and other women they talk to are just as confused as they are. What is this thing they’re going through? I’ve talked to other feminist social scientists and humanities scholars who think we should call menopause “reproductive aging” or “the menopause transition” to signify that variation over time is really the only guaranteed experience at this time of life. Endocrinologists and biologists turn around and tell me that the term “reproductive aging” is faulty because all that term signifies is that we are all maturing from birth on – that it is an empty term signifying nothing. I listen to endocrinologists, epidemiologists, public health educators, women’s health advocates, menstrual activist researchers, biologists, and clinical/biomedical researchers who are all ready with their own take on what terminology and definition is “best” for describing this time of life. Some argue that there is a strict three-phase model of perimenopause, menopause, and postmenopause that we should follow. Some argue for a five or even seven stage model for “menopause,” parsing out pre, post, early and late stages of the menstrual life course (such as early and late  premenopause, early and late perimenopause, menopause, early and late postmenopause, etc.). Some argue that perimenopause is really the only “stage” of “menopause” or late reproductive life that women really want to know about because that is when all the (negative) symptoms come. I hear others argue that “menopause” and “postmenopause” are the same thing, or are that these are conflated terms that mean nothing, and that both of these terms should be scrapped. (Yet then I hear individual women I interview tell me that postmenopause is as frustrating as perimenopause.) I hear other researchers say that EVERY term associated with menopause or reproductive aging is faulty. If I listen to individual menopausal women, they tell me the same. Two months ago, I did a presentation on midlife in general, and a feminist humanities scholar (whom I respect quite a bit) told me I shouldn’t be using the term “midlife” at all, because it is a non-term itself, defined by nothing. If I think about all of the terms I associate with menopause – menopause, the climacteric, the change, the change of life, perimenopause, postmenopause, the late reproductive years, the menopause transition, women’s midlife transition, reproductive aging, etc. – I don’t even know what terms I should be using. Over time I have thought that the best case scenario is just to use the term that women themselves use (therefore I used the word “menopause” a lot to describe a whole transition, or adopted the term “reproductive aging” when urged by feminist scholars to do so in order to define a broader transition). But, now, I’ve been critiqued recently for not correcting individual women when they use the “wrong” term to describe what they’re going through.

Menstruation Gets Blamed for Everything!

November 8th, 2011 by David Linton

© Bettman/CORBIS, Creative Commons 2.0

In Gore Vidal’s 2006 memoir, Point to Point Navigation, he name drops his way through more than four decades of a very interesting life with great stories about the famous and notorious folks who crossed his path. One tale is related by his stepmother, Kit, about her former husband and Gore Vidal’s father, Gene Vidal, and his relationship with the pioneering woman pilot, Amelia Earhart, with whom he apparently had a long-running affair. Gene Vidal was also a pilot as well as an innovative businessman involved in many aspects of what was then called air commerce.

According to Kit, her husband had a theory about the accident over the Pacific that killed Earhart. He believed that she had deliberately crashed the plane: “’She was going through a bad time with G.P. [George Palmer Putnam, her publisher husband]; she was also undergoing some sort of premature menopause.’”

Whew! It seems that no matter where you turn, if a woman is having a bad day, the menstrual explanation will be trotted out. But suicide by plane crash as a response to perimenopause?!?! Now, there’s a flight of fancy.

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Some recent news about Hot Flushes and Night Sweats

October 25th, 2011 by Chris Hitchcock

Prevalence of Hot Flushes and Night Sweats in UK women 54-65

In a new, large (over 10 000 women)  survey of UK women aged 54-65, Myra Hunter and colleagues reported on the proportion of women who have hot flushes and night sweats (HF/NS), and on how frequent and bothersome they found them. Surprisingly, they did not find a difference across ages; 54% of women reported that they currently experienced hot flushes and/or night sweats, and this was as true for women in their mid-60′s as in their mid-50′s. Current users of hormone therapy were less likely to have current HF/NS, while those who had discontinued hormone therapy were more likely to have HF/NS compared with never users. It is common to think that HF/NS last for 2-5 years in a woman’s early 50′s. This study suggests that there is a need for therapies that are effective and can be used safely for a much longer duration.

FDA says no to Pristiq for (Post)Menopausal Hot Flushes

In early September, the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) turned down Pfizer’s request to market it’s antidepressant drug, Pristiq, as a treatment for hot flushes in menopausal women. Pfizer inherited Pristiq when it acquired Wyeth (makers of the hormone therapy medication PremPro).  This is the first anti-depressant to seek official approval for this indication, although there has been research and promotion of antidepressants as alternative, non-hormonal, off-label medications for vasomotor symptoms (hot flushes and night sweats) for some time.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there has been little coverage of this in the media, as contrasted with the coverage of the various steps towards this point.

I have noticed that when a drug therapy is approved or takes a step along the path towards approval, news coverage is general and widespread. When there is a hitch in the approval process, often only the financial markets pick up the story, because it affects share values. However, there is an article in Medscape that provides more background on the history of this application.

 

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Some Online Articles on Menopause ARE Worth Reading!

October 13th, 2011 by Heather Dillaway

I get Google Alerts on “menopause” every Wednesday because it’s important that I know about the new bits of information popping up about the topic I research most. Most of the time, though, I’m frustrated with the discussion of menopause online and don’t pay attention much to the alerts I get. Yet, amidst the endless biomedical debates about whether soy or other supplements and alternative therapies reduce hot flashes, whether hormone therapies (HT) are risky, and whether or not a male menopause exists, there ARE a few important things to notice in the online menopause world. For instance, a short article called “True or False: Test your menopause smarts” at SunHerald.com (a news sources for the “Biloxi-Gulfport and South Mississippi” region) represents what I see as a fairly positive contribution to the online readings on women’s health and, more specifically, menopause. For instance, in reviewing menopause the author proposes that:

1.       There ARE variations in women’s experiences, and that these variations are normal!

2.      Too often we see menopause as primarily negative, when there are positive things about menopause. Or, at the very least, women might be likely to feel indifferent about menopause.

3.      The menopause transition (perimenopause) can be a long-term process, and the author acknowledges that it could last as long as a decade or more. Women probably need to know this from the start!

4.      Hot flashes are normal despite being frustrating, and that it is likely that you might experience them.

5.      Women might not feel one particular way about sex during menopause – and no matter whether you feel good or bad about sex during menopause it’s probably okay (unless you personally would like it to be different, in which case there are probably things you can do to change your situation).

6.      The U.S. does not represent the best model for how to go through menopause (at least this is what the author infers). In fact, women in other countries may fair much better as they go through menopause, for a variety of reasons that the author does not get into.

7.      Recent breakthroughs in medical science might make women who are worried about having children get a blood test to see how long they have until perimenopause sets in (see my earlier blog post about this blood test last year!). The way in which the author wrote up this part of their article suggests to me that they can see the pros and cons of this blood test, which I like.

Many of my blog posts represent a critique of information out there for menopausal women, but I thought it might be nice to highlight a positive contribution to the online literature on women’s health. Despite my minor critiques of this article (e.g., the word “suffer” appears frequently, and there is a huge focus on sex over other topics, etc.), I think women should read this article. Which leads me to my main point in writing this blog post: there ARE some good things out there about menopause. Anyone else find a good example of positive health information lately?  :-)

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Cardiovascular deaths increase with steady aging, not menopause

September 27th, 2011 by Chris Hitchcock

Earlier this month, researchers published a statistical analysis of mortality data in England, Wales and the United States, disproving the common statement that, after menopause, women face increased rates of mortality from heart disease. There are other studies that have come to similar conclusions, but there are a few things that make this study different. One is that it drew on epidemiological data from three different parts of the world, which reduces the likelihood of a local coincidence. A second is that they took care to create longitudinal data sets, comparing women born in different birth decades with the appropriate mortality over time. In doing so, they avoided the problems of cross-sectional data.

The authors found that there was a steady exponential increase in risk with age, and that there was no sign of accelerated risk at the typical age of menopause (50). They compared different versions of mortality curves, and were able to show that a two-stage model of mortality with a hinge at menopause was not a good fit to the data.

These findings have received national and international coverage, and are a major blow to the argument that menopausal women require premenopausal hormones to retain premenopausal protection from cardiovascular risk. Menopausal women are older than premenopausal women, and that is why they are more likely to die from cardiovascular disease, not because of the hormonal changes of menopause.

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Readers should note that statements published in re: Cycling are those of individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Society as a whole.