One of the things that can become disturbing for a woman or her family members is when some memory changes start to occur.\u00a0 And this can be not remembering what she said, this could be not remembering what someone else said, this could be going into the kitchen and \u201cI came in here to get something and I don’t remember what it is\u201d, it could be not remembering the movie or the book.\u00a0 And a family member can feel like \u201cWow, she’s just not paying attention to me anymore.\u00a0 She’s just not, she just doesn’t care, she doesn’t pay attention.\u201d\u00a0 But it’s not that.\u00a0 It’s really a change in memory, a change in the ability to recall.\u00a0 Word recall, name recall, trying to speak in a sentence and trying to find a certain word.\u00a0 Not remembering someone walking down the street and it’s kind of embarrassing, \u201cI don’t remember her name\u201d.\u00a0 So those things can become problematic and they can become scary. Because for some women, this isn’t just a hormonal change or just a normal age related change, but it’s the beginning of\u00a0 a progressive change.\u00a0 And we often don’t know at this point and time, especially in the forty-something, fifty-something what it really means.\u00a0 And there is really not great ability to discern \u201cis this a terrible problem, is this a minor problem?\u201d.\u00a0 And often, the doctor needs more time to elapse to understand what is the nature of the situation here.\u00a0 Alzheimer’s disease is far more common in women than it is in men.\u00a0 And that’s because of this whole estrogen deal, we think, and the brain.\u00a0 So it’s not surprising that women have more Alzheimer’s than do men.\u00a0 And there are other things like osteoporosis which is related to menopause is more common in women than in men because it’s more estrogen mediated than it is testosterone mediated.\u00a0 But, I’m getting distracted away from memory.<\/p>\n
So one of the ways that the hormonal changes can affect our brain chemistry, it could result in anxiety, I mentioned that briefly as part of the mood changes.\u00a0\u00a0 But anxiety in particular might need a little bit more attention in that it can be mild, just feeling, waking up in the morning and just feeling a little \u201coff\u201d, a little anxious, or lying in bed at night and worrying a little bit more.\u00a0 Being a little bit more anxious about going to the party or going to another social event.\u00a0 But it can also become much more significant and even severe.\u00a0 There are women that never had an anxiety syndrome, never had panic attacks, and now all of a sudden are in the emergency room with chest pain, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, and there is nothing wrong with their heart.\u00a0 It’s a bona fide panic, anxiety attack.\u00a0 And that is a part of this whole hormonal influence on our brain chemistry is worrying more, anticipatory anxiety, stressing about upcoming events.\u00a0 Any way, shape or form, just feeling more anxious.\u00a0 Being more sensitive too to what someone says.\u00a0 You know your husband says something \u201cdid he really mean this? did he mean that?\u201d being anxious that he’s… even paranoid.\u00a0 Maybe more jealousy coming up around this anxiety syndrome can happen all mediated by these hormonal changes.<\/p>\n
Often women ask me the question is \u201chow long is this going to last, Dr. Hudson?\u201d and \u201cwhen is this going to end Dr. Hudson?\u201d and I wish I could answer that question \u201cit’s only going to last this time\u201d, but the truth is it’s…I can not.\u00a0 It’s unpredictable.\u00a0 It’s different for all of us.\u00a0 The severity is different for each of us, the duration is different for each of us, which symptoms we have on this long list of potential symptoms is different for each of us.\u00a0 But, on an average, according to the research, menopause symptoms for seventy five to ninety percent of women last four to seven years.\u00a0 Now, there’s the ten to twenty five percent of women for whom that’s different.\u00a0 And we don’t know if at year three, at year four or at year seven if you are going to be on your way out of these symptoms or are you going to be one of these ten to twenty five percent that is going to last longer.\u00a0 There is no way to really know that.\u00a0 We are trying to get some understanding.\u00a0 If you’ve had severe PMS, it seems to have some prediction on menopause being more severe.\u00a0 That’s one thing we seem to see a correlation with now.\u00a0 But unfortunately, we can’t really predict what your menopause is going to be like, let alone, can we predict how long it’s going to last.\u00a0 But we can work with the law of averages and try to give some reassurance. And most symptoms are temporary in most women.\u00a0 The problem is there’s the women that are not \u201cmost women\u201d and the problem is that there are a few symptoms that tend to be progressive, like vaginal dryness, vaginal thinning, urinary incontinence, that set of symptoms tends to get worse with time because that tissue gets more consequences as it is deprived of estrogen for a\u00a0 longer period of time.\u00a0 But most other things, symptoms, not bone loss, not some of those things, but symptoms.\u00a0 Most of those are temporary in most women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the things that can become disturbing for a woman or her family members is when some memory changes start to occur.\u00a0 And this can be not remembering what she said, this could be not remembering what someone else said, this could be going into the kitchen and \u201cI came in here to get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-menopause"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbrehm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbrehm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbrehm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbrehm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbrehm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/janbrehm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":335,"href":"https:\/\/janbrehm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions\/335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbrehm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbrehm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbrehm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}