MYTHBUSTING WITH DR LINDA DEAR

Should you be guided by your mother’s menopause?

We always ask the age of your mum (especially if your mum has gone through menopause early), but you can have a completely different version of menopause than your mum. Looking to relatives can be vaguely helpful but not definite.

Can you have menopausal symptoms but still have a period?

You can still be having horrendous perimenopausal symptoms and your periods have not changed one bit.

Is there an accurate test for menopause?

You can have normal hormone blood tests and be perimenopausal as hell. Blood tests can slip everyone up – there is no test for perimenopause. There is a test for menopause but the woman’s body tells you by not bleeding for a whole year. If you have a bleed within that time, you start the clock again. FSH (the hormone measured) fluctuates in peri, and sometimes it looks like it looks in menopause, so we can’t rely on that being measured.

Can you check for menopause if you’ve had a hysterectomy when there’s no womb or period?

You can check FSH but we want to know on two separate days – so if you get two high FSH readings in a woman, we’re more willing to say she’s been through it. The higher they are, the more confident we feel. From a medical point of view it doesn’t change options when a woman has had a hysterectomy. We can offer a woman all the same treatments whether she’s post- menopausal or perimenopausal – her symptoms matter more than her blood test results.

What if you don't have a period because of a Mirena?

If the woman has a Mirena, then it’s sometimes useful to do the FSH to confirm that she has actually gone through the menopause and her periods have now stopped naturally. That way we know that if we remove the Mirena, she isn’t going to get pregnant or get the heavy horrible periods back.

Is it true the symptoms of menopause can continue after you’ve been through it?

There are a fair number of women who continue to have hot flushes for the rest of their life, and they never sleep a whole night through until the day they die, and some of these women are really struggling. For most of us, it does not last forever; for the vast majority, whether you take HRT or not, your body adapts.

Will HRT prolong my menopause, or will I get addicted?

Nature happens in the background even if you’re on HRT. Most get off HRT and the symptoms have gone, they go through the choppy bit relatively unscathed. Then it’s fairly smooth post-menopausal sailing.

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