Women’s Health After Menopause: Thriving with 6 Key Strategies

Women’s health after menopause

Women’s health after menopause can be a challenging topic for many women and men because their experience can be based on multiple factors. Yet, it is vitally important that the person with menopausal symptoms be given the best advice on how to improve her quality of life.

After menopause, changes happen in your body. Here are some more facts about what’s going on:

1. Menopause is a natural part of your cycle that occurs once per woman in her 40s.

2. For a long time, many people thought menopause ended when a woman had her last period or became menopausal. But studies show that people with premature menopause—before 45—may face greater risks of heart disease, osteoporosis, breast cancer, infertility, and depression. The rate of premature menopause in the United States may be up to 10 times higher than previously thought.

3. In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that doctors stop thinking of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) as effective for curing menopause symptoms or reversing them. It’s more important to consider HRT as an option to improve quality of life and to decrease the risk of cardiovascular and breast cancer, among other conditions.

4. Women with early menopause may have hormone-related hot flashes, vaginal dryness, low libido, difficulty sleeping, and mood changes. HRT can help with these symptoms.

5. In 2013, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) changed its advice on whether women should wait to have children, as long as they can have children and plan to have them soon. The group now recommends that women wait to have their first child until after age 35 if they haven’t already had a child, though some women will still wait a few years. For women planning to have children in the future, the group recommends waiting to have children at least 10 years before having their first child.

5. Many of the health risks women face during the menopause transition, such as osteoporosis, weight gain, heart disease, and stroke, can be reversed with dietary changes, a healthy weight, and exercise. See more healthy diet and exercise tips.

In addition to menopause-related risks, you can suffer other health issues as a result of aging. If you experience pain or discomfort in the breasts, breast cancer is a likely cause.

When to see your doctor 

Women who experience hot flashes or vaginal dryness should tell their doctor if they’re concerned about possible medical conditions.

For women who have had a hysterectomy, fertility issues often crop up at the same time as menopause. Menopause can also delay a woman’s ability to conceive. If either of the women had been trying to conceive, they’d need to make an appointment with a fertility specialist right away, so they can get help with that goal. Women who’ve had one hysterectomy have another issue to worry about: lumps in their breasts. If they notice an abnormality in the skin on their chest or armpit or other areas where the skin is thin, they should talk to their doctor. Tumors, even small ones, can become cancerous and can cause pain and discomfort.

A healthy diet rich in fruit, vegetables, and whole grains is linked to a lower risk of depression among post-menopause women, a US study suggests. Researchers followed 1,675 women for an average of nine years and found that a higher intake of fruits and vegetables and whole grains was associated with a 26 percent reduced risk of major depression during that period when the participants were ages 50 to 69. Researchers also found that a higher ratio of vegetables to total calorie intake and lower whole grain intake was associated with a 35 percent increased risk of depression.

The study, which is part of the most extensive study of post-menopausal women ever conducted, didn’t find any protective effect for eating dairy products. The study wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove whether or how certain foods or nutrients might directly affect depression. Because depression often requires professional treatment, the findings can’t prove that dietary changes prevent mental health disorders.

“This study, however, does suggest that there may be a benefit to nutritional counseling, the study authors write in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Previous research has linked the quality and quantity of sleep a woman gets with a lower risk of depression, and sleep deprivation has also been linked to a higher depression risk, noted Jennifer Kuk, a researcher at the University of Alberta who wasn’t involved in the study.

It’s possible that diets that include certain vegetables, researchers note. It’s not clear, however, if eating vegetables causes people to sleep better or sleep better because they are eating more vegetables, or if they are just more likely to eat vegetables if they are depressed, Kuk said by email.”This study does not tell us how our dietary choices might directly affect our mood,” Kuk said.

“One thing we do know is that the more vegetable servings you get in your diet, the more variety you will eat and the better your intake of various foods, whether you are depressed or not,” Kuk added. To assess depression symptoms, the researchers asked participants to complete questionnaires about how often they experienced things like sleep problems, excessive guilt, hopelessness, fatigue, poor appetite, poor concentration, and poor personal care, among other symptoms.

The participants were not told which type of vegetable content in their diet was best. Researchers used the three most common vegetables found in the participants’ diets. They calculated how much vegetable content each one contained, based on the amount the participants ate over the day. Results for women who ate the most vegetables were compared to the most commonly eaten vegetables in the U.S. diet. The researchers adjusted the results to account for several factors that can influence depression risk, such as age, income, race, and education, as well as diabetes.

While other studies have linked eating foods like fruits and vegetables with lower depression risk, researchers question whether the relationship is due to the food itself or to what people may do or spend their time doing when they eat these foods.”Not everyone responds to the same things the same way. Sometimes it’s that they’ve been spending more time on their garden, or exercising more, or being more social, or whatever it is that’s benefiting them,” said lead study author Renata Micha of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

To try to understand what component of the healthy diet may be behind the link, the researchers tested more than 40 different foods and beverage components for their effect on depression risk. The biggest single driver was whole grains, the study found. Because whole grains are denser than refined grains, they tend to stay in the digestive system longer and have a longer incubation period for gut bacteria, Micha said. Based on the results, Micha advises women who regularly eat whole grains to keep what they eat balanced.” I recommend that the women in my study get enough fiber, but that the fiber is of the whole grains rather than the refined grains,” she said.

Whole grains, vegetables, and fruits are all rich in anti-inflammatory compounds called polyphenols that have been found to have anti-depressive effects in previous research. The study wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove whether or how eating foods or taking supplements might influence the risk of developing depression. Even so, the findings add to a large body of evidence indicating that having a healthy diet, physical activity, and adequate sleep might help ease the symptoms of depression and could lessen the risk of developing depression in the first place, said Susan Albers, a public health researcher at Harvard University in Boston who wasn’t involved in the study.

“These findings are consistent with other evidence of the benefits of adopting a dietary pattern high in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and nuts, and low in processed meat, red meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, refined grain products, and margarine,” the authors write in JAMA Psychiatry.

Micha said the authors controlled for some important factors, like other diet habits, exercise, and sleep quality, so the findings are perhaps not as surprising as they first appear. The study can’t prove whether or how a healthy diet or supplements might directly lower the risk of depression, but the benefit of healthier eating or supplements may influence the body in other ways. It’s also possible that improving depression symptoms may require more than eating or taking supplements alone, Micha said.”Depression is an illness. It’s not a diet or a lifestyle choice,” she said.

“You could try to improve your diet or try to improve your physical activity, but there’s no guarantee that that will help you to get better,” The study results might also be influenced by people choosing different diets and by how they record their diet, researchers note. Because the study was observational, it wasn’t designed to prove whether or how diet or supplements might directly lower the risk of depression.