Category — Research on Menopause

Calling all Menopause Goddesses. We need your help in a cutting edge new study. As you all know, research on the menopause transition has been sadly lacking.  I have been bitching about that for what seems like forever.

Thanks to Menopause Goddess, Dee Adams, the creator of Minnie Pauz Menopause cartoons, I learned of an exciting new study in progress.

Mary Fischer, a nursing doctoral student at University of Massachusetts is exploring women’s experiences with discontinuing hormone therapy. How timely is that?

So many goddesses, including yours truly, are working to discontinue our hormone therapy – and frankly, like so much of the Big M, this is uncharted territory. Fear and loathing on the Menopause Trail, you might say.

Thankfully, this new study is qualitative in nature. Rather than simply yes or no answers, our experience in our own words is requested in addition to necessary quantitative data. Which as we Menopause Goddesses know is one of the major ways we share information: through stories of personal experience.

If you are a Menopause Goddess in the process of decreasing or discontinuing your HRT (hormone replacement therapy) or have already ceased your HRT, I urge you to contact Mary to participate in the study. I’ve already gratefully filed out the online study after signing the informed consent and receiving my user name and password.

This is how we will help ourselves and the women who come after us (like our daughters) to have an easier Menopause journey. Women sharing wisdom: that’s what it’s all about.

Contact Mary Fischer at 508-877-3316 or email her at mary.fischer@umassmed.edu to get started.

I’d like to be a jellyfish
‘Cause jelly fish don’t pay rent…

They’re just simple protoplasm
Clear as cellophane.
They ride the winds of fortune,
Life without a brain.”

from the song Mental Floss by Jimmy Buffett

Now that my menopause brain fog has lifted, I notice an interesting new mental phenomenon manifesting itself. It’s a little like what longtime meditators call monkey mind (and I call Menopausal HDD). Still, it’s different. Monkeys jump from tree to tree exuberantly. Monkey mind jumps from thought to thought, idea to idea quickly. There’s almost a manic energy to them.

This new syndrome is more like jellyfish mind. While myriad thoughts intrude themselves, one atop another, I find myself floating among them. I’m drifting in a sea filled with plans, ideas, to-do’s, memories, wishes. Like a jellyfish, I float from thought to thought as they wave and brush against me.

I don’t mind the floating either. Which is weird. Because I like to be focused. Heck, I need to be focused. But too often, I just float from one thought to the next, one thing to the next, serenely. I feel like a caricature of a Zen master (mistress?).

And since it is time for another blog entry and I am surrounded by flotsam and jetsam in my own little ocean, I’m going to write about the various kelp-thoughts that brush against me. The warning here is that these topics may not go together at all. Yet they have at least The Big M in common. Okay, there’s the disclaimer – don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Estrogen Addiction Say What?
Yep, Apparently our hot flashes are due to an estrogen addiction. UBC Professor of Endocrinology Dr. Jerilynn C. Prior presented her findings on estrogen addiction and its treatment with progesterone at Women’s Health Congress 2010 in Washington DC. Not a joke. Really.

According to Dr. Prior, when a woman has a hot flash:

“she’s experiencing a massive release of brain chemicals … Integrating what we know about hot flushes has led to the hypothesis that the brain exposed to prolonged high estrogen levels reacts like the brain of an addict without a fix when estrogen levels drop. The best animal model of hot flushes is the heroin-addicted mouse.”

Apparently, the treatment for this estrogen addiction is progesterone, since “estrogen and progesterone work together in every tissue of a woman’s body.”

Okay. I’ll bite. Massive release of brain chemicals sounds right on. Furthermore, I’m a big believer in natural progesterone cream. But as I’m floating in my little sea, these thoughts brush against me. Do we have to name everything so that it sounds like a disease or disorder? When Mom Nature cold turkeys us at Menopause, does she know what she has done? And is progesterone now our methadone?

Dr. Prior and her team suggest that women who have taken estrogen will have tons more hot flashes when they stop the hormones. Does that mean instead of 20-30 per day, I’ll have 40-50? I gotta tell you, it doesn’t make me excited about stopping my bioidentical patch anytime soon. And I am definitely planning to decrease and ultimately discontinue it, having passed that magical three year mark. Will I need truckloads of progesterone to combat the dreaded withdrawal from my estrogen addiction? Do I need a 12 step program?

There were a bunch of other kelp thoughts I was going to share, but I’ve drifted too far past them and run out of room. They’ll likely show up in the next post.

As Jimmy Buffett continues in his song,

“In one ear and out the other.
Don’t you get criss crossed.
I recommend you try a little
Mental floss.”

As a nurse, I belong to a continuing education / latest research site called Medscape. It’s nothing short of wonderful. When I think of the sheer poundage of my professional magazines that I subscribed to in the past, it boggles the mind. (And stimulates my guilt reflex when pondering how many trees gave their lives so that I might give better nursing care.)

Now with a couple of keystrokes, I can stuff my few remaining brain cells with the latest nursing and medical knowledge. Amazing. I love love love the internet. But I digress – which happens to me a lot since The Big M.

I’d like to share a few of the latest research findings regarding menopausal women.

Hot Flashes Sufferers Live Longer?
I received a tweet the other day that stated “research shows women that have a large number of hot flashes live longer.” I went to the actual study and found that in truth, it was women that reported night sweats in addition to their hot flashes. They had a 30% lower mortality rate from heart disease than women who didn’t suffer from nocturnal overheating, irrespective of risk factors or HRT (hormone replacement therapy) usage.

Wow. I believe that I will likely live to 210 years of age if this is true. Thank God for wicking sleepwear. (Stay tuned for the debut of our Menopause Marketplace to find great wicking sleepwear vendors.)

Does Depression Affect Menopausal Symptoms?
This study found that women suffering depression reported more menopause symptoms. Conversely, the authors were surprised to find that menopause also seemed to lead to more depression. The first thing I have to say about these results is “Well , DUH!”

The second is that this sounds a little like “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Which we could debate forever, but why would we want to?

Most important were the conclusions of the study – that identification and treatment of depression might help with symptoms of menopause as well.

True enough, but at what cost? We are already seeing a number of articles promoting antidepressants to treat menopause, which really is like trying to shoot a fly with an elephant gun. While I am the first to say that menopause symptoms suck, I also believe in the remedy with the least side effects that helps.

I strongly believe in antidepressant drugs when necessary. When depression causes significant disruption of daily life activities or relationships or suicidal thoughts, then pharmaceutical treatment along with professional therapy can be life saving.

But we need to assess a matter of degree with depression. Some mild depression, e.g. feeling sad and blue, weepy, not motivated during menopause affected all of the Goddesses to some degree. When we shared it with one another, it lessened greatly. It was wonderful to find out that it was normal and it was likely temporary.

Two of our goddesses have suffered from depression pre-menopause and have taken antidepressant therapy successfully. The rest of us just felt crappy for awhile.

Risk for Major Depression Increases During and After Menopause

Basically this study found that the risk of major depression doubles during perimenopause and menopause when compared with premenopause. That sounds about right. To put that in perspective, if two of your twenty friends suffered a major depressive episode before any of you went into menopause, then it might be likely that 4 of your friends would suffer a major depressive episode. Leaving 16 feeling blue and “normally” depressed.

I couldn’t find out how the researchers defined major depressive episode. One of the researchers did make this statement, which was billed in the Medscape article as the take-home message for clinicians. “When women come in and are thinking that they have some extra difficulties with life and feel down and blue…take it seriously. It is not just a passing thing.”

Okay, that worries me. Because it describes nearly every menopausal woman I’ve known at some point in her journey. I personally felt down and blue, and was dragging my weary arse through the days during the worst of the Big M. I was also hot, cranky, and sleep deprived which likely made it worse. But it WAS just a passing thing. It was normal. The best treatment I experienced (besides sleep and cooling measures) was support and commiseration from my Menopause Goddess sisters.

While I’m delighted that we are doing some research on The Big M, I have to wonder why we aren’t looking into bioidentical hormones, herbal therapies, and the effects of support groups. Could it be because there is no funding for these types of research?

So ladies, remember the one Latin legal phrase I learned in nursing school “caveat emptor”. Let the buyer beware. You are the buyer of your own health care. Pick and choose. Ask questions – lots of them. Ask about side effects and risk-benefit analysis. And not to be a conspiracy theorist, but ask yourself who might have funded a given research study? Who stood to gain?

Lastly, make sure that you are followed by a physician or nurse practitioner, not led. Most health care professionals I know actually appreciate a patient who is actively involved in her own care. And if they don’t? I’d shop around for a new health care professional/partner.