Many women see induced menopause as the end of their life. The thought of not being able to have children is often seen as a death sentence to a younger woman who is forced to go through menopause. They are not worried about menopause relief, menopausal symptoms, pain, or perimenopause. These women are only concerned about not being able to bare children.

Women who have undergone a surgical procedure to have their ovaries removed are forced into an early symptom menopause. They do not go through premenopausal reactions or have any other sign of premenopause; instead, women who have an induction of menopause are thrust into the world of hot flashes, night sweats, and emotions. An induced hot flash is just not the same as a hot flash at the age of 55

Menopause that is caused by a medical condition such as certain drug or radiation therapies is hard for a young woman to come to terms with. Many times the illness related to the drug therapy, or radiation, came on quickly and without warning. Within a matter of weeks or even days, their doctor may have brought up the discussion of inducing menopause.

Removing the ovaries can also induce menopause. For women who have had a surgically induced type of menopause, fertility ends immediately. Levels of estrogen and testosterone will decline much more rapidly than natural menopause. For women who have to go through this type of menopause, the symptoms can be exaggerated and extremely hard to deal with.

All the normal symptoms of menopause are present, like:

Hot Flashes Night Sweats Irritability Mood Swings Anxiety Depression Formication… the feeling of creepy crawlies all over your body!

None of these menopausal symptoms are fun to go through during natural menopause. When a woman is thrust into menopause, these symptoms can be completely unbearable. The extreme nature of a forced menopause can include one symptom that is exaggerated or it can include all the symptoms being exaggerated at the same time.

On a more positive note…women who go through a forced menopause are likely to suffer their symptoms for a much shorter time period than a woman who goes through natural menopause. Natural menopause can last several years but a forced menopause will last only a fraction of that time.

Menopause is a time of great change throughout a woman’s body and her life. For women who go through natural menopause, they have time to prepare for the changes that are about to take place. For a woman who undergoes a forced early menopause, the body and life changes are fast and often unexpected. This expedited menopause can leave the woman with dramatically increased menopause symptoms, which can be very difficult to handle. The plus side is that a forced menopause will not last long.

So for any woman, who has to go through an abrupt menopause, remember that it is not the end and life will go on!



Thanks to Remy Jirek for contributing this article to our Menopause blog:

Natural Relief For Menopause

By: Sharon Bell

Are you a woman between 35 and 50 who has PMS, migraine headaches, sudden weight gain, fatigue, irritability, tender or lumpy breasts, memory loss, fibroids, or cold hands and feet? If so, you may be experiencing symptoms of perimenopause.

The term “premenopause” is usually misused to describe the years immediately before menopause where a woman experiences menopause symptoms. That stage is correctly called perimenopause.

Whether its perimenopause or premenopause, however, most women in their mid-thirties don’t want to hear those words.

The depression that accompanies perimenopause is made worse by a decrease in sexual interest, making the person feel very unattractive. During this time, she needs the support of her husband, children, and family to help her come to terms with herself and go through the tumultuous period she is passing through.

Almost all women will suffer perimenopause symptoms eventually. In fact, they can become so serious and disrupt your life. So you should stay informed about the ways to relieve these symptoms by controlling the main cause - a hormonal imbalance produced by declining estrogen levels.

The massive hormonal imbalance that occurs in the body during the pre-menopausal stage causes massive mood swings and bouts of depression at the most inopportune moments.

The psychological effects of the perimenopause period give rise to the worst possible symptoms. Depression is sudden, unpredictable, and violent. It can make one burst into tears over a broken glass or any other trivial happening, totally baffling the woman herself and those around her.

One of the reasons that perimenopausal women don’t want to talk about their condition is because they dread this period in their lives. This attitude is sad and contributes heavily to the emotional causes of these symptoms. This attitude is particularly true with many women who have postponed having children and who wonder if they’re ever going to have children before their biological alarm clock goes off.

It’s easy to believe that you’re immortal up to your mid-thirties or mid-forties until the aging process sets in. But if you take care of yourself now, you can delay this process and make things less debilitating for you.

Maintain physical, mental, and emotional balance through the mid-cycle of your life and aging will be more graceful and less painful. Making healthy lifestyle choices may help ease some of the symptoms of perimenopause. For more information, check out www.zalestra.com.



Thanks to Sharon Bell for contributing this article to our Menopause blog:

Post Menopausal Osteoporosis

Is it Perimenopause, or Are You Just Getting Older?

One of the biggest problems with delineating perimenopause and menopausal symptoms is that there are usually so many other things happening at this stage in your life. As a result, it’s not so easy for most women (or health professionals for that matter) to figure our what causes what. Consider how many life changes that occur at middle age: your parents become ill and die, your children leave home, gravity starts to take it’s toll on your body, wrinkles begin appearing, and your body begins to start hinting at your diminishing youth and mortality. Couple that with the stress that can be brought on by all the above, and you have a sure recipe for depression (which can throw your hormone levels even further out of whack).

To compound things, there are dozens of additional physical changes your body experiences at middle age. Often, many of the symptoms you experience that are chalked up to menopause are actually just symptoms of aging. Blind studies have shown that when thousands of middle-aged men and women were asked what type of physical changes and/or symptoms they had experienced, amazingly, the only symptoms that seemed to affect women more than men were hot flashes and (obviously) vaginal dryness. All of the other possible symptoms, to include the plethora of symptoms considered as perimenopausal, affected men as much as or even more than (gasp!), women.

Many of the symptoms the experienced by the subjects of the studies conducted above were proven to simply be normal signs of aging. Examples included loss of appetite, tingling and/or crawling sensations in the skin, headaches, and difficulty with intercourse seemed to affect men and women roughly equally.

There were other experiences that did, however, seem to be related to menopause. While there had been both men and women who had experienced some sort of midlife crisis that had involved loss of confidence and difficulties in making decisions, perimenopausal women did in fact seem to have much more difficulty with these then either men or post menopausal women.

So, how do you recognize the signs and symptoms of perimenopause? Unfortunately, many of the perimenopausal symptoms are transient, but they can often be much more troubling than menopause symptoms. You may experience any or all of these symptoms in varying degrees of severity, and may also experience them differently at different times.

A few of the more common perimenopausal symptoms are:

- Hot flashes

- Night Sweats

- Insomnia

- Heavy Bleeding

- Fibroids

- Mood Swings

- Fluid Retention

- Memory Problems (i.e. “fuzzy thinking”

- Headaches

Again, those are just the more common perimenopausal symptoms, you may experience more (or in most cases less) than the above. Keep in mind that each and every woman’s physiology, environment, diet, and even stress levels can have a big impact on the severity of her symptoms. The good news is: medical science and alternative treatments are being developed every day that lesson and even negate the impact of perimenopause on your daily life.



Thanks to Dawn M. Olsen for contributing this article to our Menopause blog:

Estrogen Replacement Menopause

Can you answer Only Mama Knows’s question about Menopause?:

I was recently diagnosed has going through menopause. Some of my symptoms include feeling sweaty, being tired all the time, mood swings and just not being myself.

Symptoms Of Low Estrogen Levels

Can you answer tennis’s question about Menopause?:

I really do not want to use any HRT therapy, even bio-identicals. Can you recommend a type of Dr. to see that can treat menopause symptoms without a prescription of some type?

Alternatives To Hysterectomy