September is Menopause Awareness Month!

As a woman gets older she will eventually (around the age of 50) experience a drop in her hormone levels as the ovaries cease to produce and release eggs which negates the need for the menstrual cycle. This is known as the menopause which roughly translates as ‘the end of cycles’. It is a natural stage of life for women, but unfortunately it comes hand in hand with a variety of often unpleasant symptoms. These symptoms can include hot flashes, mood swings, disturbed sleep patterns, a loss of sex drive, fatigue, weight gain and excessive unwanted body hair.

In order to make the menopause more bearable a large number of women will turn to hormone treatments. This is because it is the hormone imbalance that occurs during the menopause which is the root cause of many of these symptoms. Hormone treatment works on the symptoms from the inside and it is slightly different for every individual. Thanks to recent developments in the field of hormone therapy it is now fairly easy for women to cope with the natural drop in hormones such as estrogen, testosterone and DHEA. The treatment will address deficiencies in these hormones which can in turn reduce the effects of the related symptoms.

There are two main types of hormone therapy in use at present. The first is treatment using synthetic versions of the hormones, but as the chemical structure is different from natural hormones they often carry unwanted side effects themselves. That is why more women opt for the second treatment which is bio-identical hormone therapy where the replacements are an exact molecular match to the hormones they are replacing. This method of treatment is actually considered to be far safer and also more effective than synthetic hormone treatment.

Every menopausal woman is different, so it is important for a medical professional to be consulted in order to determine exactly the right program of hormone therapy that will work for her. If you are currently going through the menopause or even if you are approaching it then bio-identical hormone therapy is worth finding out more about.