Dealing With Symptoms Of Menopause
There is a great misunderstanding about the terms used to elucidate the experience of menopause. The word itself is widely employed to describe the entire period in which women undergo symptoms due to their hormones being in flux. In reality, the word “menopause” refers simply to the final period of menstruation, in the same manner that “menarche” indicates the initial.
Premenopausue is used by few to point to the time whenever menstruation is natural and before hormone levels start to fall down. Few people says the word to point to the time with in the perimenopause before the final period.
The weeks before and after the final menstrual period are referred to as “perimenopause”, sometimes called the “climacteric”. Hormone levels will have begun to change. When the fluctuations settle, symptoms will cease. It has become common for for women to refer to this period of time as their menopause.
For the woman after her last period is described as postmenopausal. It starts the day after the last menstrual bleed and describes any time after that. Although the perimenopause the term will not be used until a year after the last period because no one will be sure which the last one was until a year has passed. Ninety percent of women in the perimenopause who have not had a period for six months do not have another one
Menopause Hormones
Estrogen and progesterone are created and released during an approximate 28-day cycle, that is, until the onset of menopause. The production of these hormones then becomes quite variable as the number of eggs diminish during midlife, along with their quality. As menopause approaches, there is a decrease in the levels of progesterone and estrogen.
Pre-menopausal. Leading up to ovulation is when estrogen levels reach their peak, but quickly decline afterwards. During this second half of the menstrual cycle is when progesterone starts to rise. If the ovulated egg is not fertilized, levels of both these hormones drops, which in turn signals the body to start menstrual bleeding.
Perimenopause. Ovulation is getting more irregular and infrequent, even though estrogen is still being produced by your ovaries. Progesterone is not actually produced during every menstrual cycle now, and for some months there may be no bleeding at all.
Postmenopausal. The small amount of estrogen now present is mainly produced by fat cells breaking down and converting the male hormone androstenedione.
Brittle Bones and Osteoporosis
In the western world 50% the women at the age of seventy are seriously affected by osteoporosis, and just only 10 years after the average age of menopause i.e. around the age of sixty nearly 25% of women will have already brittle bones. This is clearly due to the level of estrogen circulating the blood stream. The increased risk of osteoporosis is a good enough reason to find menopause treatments, of some kind, to help protect your health well into old age.
The metabolism of calcium, the mineral mainly involved in bone building, is in part dependent on estrogen and there are estrogen receptors in the osteoclasts and osteoblasts. The levels of available calcium circulating in the bloodstream are partly controlled by the hormones calcitonin and parathyroid hormone.
Most of our calcium is stored in our bones, and if blood calcium levels fall the parathyroid hormone will act to break down bone and release calcium into the blood. Low estrogen levels make bone more sensitive to parathyroid hormone, causing it to be broken down more rapidly after menopause.
