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Hotflash!
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 Mike
Collins: Do men go through this too? It seems
to me that when I was 20, I used to be able to keep everything in my mind. I couldn’t
do that today any more than I could fly with my arms.Sue Spataro: Well, that part of it too. It’s like the chicken and the egg. Is it aging or is t the complexity of dealing with older children. People are going through divorces. But these are things that they normally would not forget. Dr. Teaff: Another thing is sleep deprivation. Women have night sweats with this condition and they were told by their doctors, "You can’t be having symptoms, you haven’t had your last period yet." Well, we know that very clearly, the horse is out of the barn and down the road by that time. A lot of women will begin to have night sweats like the week before their period, or they are just not sleeping. Estrogen as it changes has an effect on the quality of sleep, so then again women don’t feel as good. They haven’t been as rested and it is another reason why they might have poor memory or poor concentration, so it’s not that they are losing their mind, but certainly a women who is at the top of a bank for example is going to concerned if she is not hitting on all cylinders.  Sue Spataro: That an excellent point. I find that on our support group
HotFlash!, we have helped thousands of women in answering questions and trying to get the
support and resources they need. One of the primary reasons they come to us, is because
they think they are going crazy. They think they are losing their minds. And Nancy is
right, part of it is the sleep deprivation, part of it is the ups and downs of the
hormones, and what happens is the irritability and the crying. They feel like they are
losing their minds and because of that they won’t tell anybody what’s going on.Dr Teaff: Men are much more on an even keel hormonally from day to day, whereas are used to a kind of cycle for 20 to 30 years and all of a sudden things are going haywire and they can depend on their bodies feeling the way that it should and that’s very distracting too.  Mike Collins: Somebody described it as
"up-down-up-down-down-up-down-stop." It is completely erratic and the levels of
up and down are much steeper.Sue Spataro: And you try to get patterns. I recommend that women keep daily journals. The first day of their cycle is the first day of your period. From that point on, keep track of your food, your exercise, your medications and your stress levels. These things over a period of time will reveal a pattern and this way you can get a grip on lifestyle changes, exercise and food choices. Mike Collins: Women complain of being miserable, can you define these miseries? Dr. Teaff: The insomnia and also how it affects their families. As a mother you are trying to take care of your family and many women feel guilty about being irritable and sex drive really goes to pot when you don’t sleep well. Women do not have the same testosterone levels as men, as so they don’t have an innate drive and is primarily psychological and is not hormonally driven. When they feel bad, they are not interested in sex and the relationship may suffer. He may be going through problems and needs support. She can’t offer it and the women feel guilty about. And you have to intervene and make some changes. Mike Collins: There is no certain that this definitely begins at, but idoes tend to occur at age 35. Right?  Dr. Teaff: The
first inkling that the hormonal changes were real and not in their heads, came out of the
infertility aspect of my practice, which gives more information on the scientific basis of
perimenopause. We watched fertility rates and our success in our IVF (in vitro
fertilization) programs drop, slowly at first but noticeably after age 34. There is a
change in what we call the "ovarian reserve" in the quality of eggs left in the
ovary and in the hormonal production in the ovary by age 34. It only accelerates as women
get past the age of 37. It made sense to all of us in reproductive endocrinology that,
hey, if their fertility is dropping, then doesn’t it make sense that these women
would be noticing something else too.Mike Collins: One of the common misconceptions is that some women believe that if they have had later onset of puberty that there will be a later onset of menopause, that is not true. Dr. Teaff: That is true. Men make sperm till they die. Women are born with all the eggs that they will ever have. A lot people don’t know that. Sue Spataro: Well Charlie Chaplin was fathering children until he was 80 years old. I tell my husband, Joe, that’s "it’s made fresh daily." As fetuses, we develop a couple of million eggs and we lose over half before we’re born. Dr. Teaff: It’s miillions as a fetus. They drop off to one or two million at birth and then by puberty you have 700,000 and by menopause you have only a thousand left. It’s kind of like they are hanging on. There’s not a lot left to help you hormonally. |
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| Questions? Ideas? Comments? contact us at hotflash@families-first.com | |||||
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