Cognitive decline is common during the transition into menopause, including symptoms such as forgetfulness and delayed verbal memory, reduced verbal processing speed, and impaired verbal learning.
During menopause, it's common for menopause to impact mental health too. Symptoms include mood changes such as irritability, sadness, lack of motivation, aggressiveness, problems focusing, stress, difficulty concentrating, and depression.
These may include physical symptoms, such as hot flashes, decreased energy levels, and sleep disruption, as well as mood-related symptoms, such as anxiety and depression. Over time, these symptoms gradually disappear. Although menopause ends fertility, women can stay healthy, vital, and sexual.
In perimenopause and the early stages of menopause, women describe changes in their ability to think clearly, make decisions and function well mentally. Some describe this as “brain fog”. They may experience difficulty assimilating and making use of new information.
In postmenopause, symptoms of menopause may have eased or stopped entirely, but some women continue to have symptoms for longer. The change in your body's hormones however is a sign to keep looking after your health and wellbeing, and be mindful to listen to your body.
In the post-menopausal woman, gray matter volume returns to normal, especially in areas concerned with some types of memory and cognitive processing. In fact, in postmenopausal women, the gray matter volume was similar to that of males of the same age and increased over the next two years.
While memory lapses in old age are popularly associated with dementia or Alzheimer's disease, studies have shown that most menopausal women have improvements in their memory after menopause is complete.
Many strange sensations can be experienced during menopause including feeling off-balanced, spaced out, vibrations or butterfly feelings, electric shocks and the feeling that insects are crawling inside your skin.
What helps with brain fog during menopause? The good news is that brain fog associated with menopause is temporary. Here are tips from Jean Hailes for Women's Health to help combat brain fog. Exercise regularly.
Common Emotional Symptoms of Menopause
Some common emotional symptoms caused by perimenopause and menopause include: Irritability. Increased impatience or total lack of patience.
Women often think breast cancer is their biggest threat, but the most significant danger they face after menopause is actually heart disease. Nearly a third of women develop cardiovascular disease, the AHA says, and the rate of heart attacks in women begins increasing roughly a decade after menopause.
And the continued low estrogen levels lead to more serious health concerns. The rate of bone loss speeds up, increasing your risk of low bone density, osteopenia and osteoporosis. You also have a higher chance of having a heart attack, stroke or other heart-related issues.
Women will experience hormone imbalance as they enter and transition through to menopause due to declining oestrogen, progesterone and testosterone levels and a rise in control hormones FSH and LH.
The menopausal transition most often begins between ages 45 and 55. It usually lasts about seven years but can be as long as 14 years. The duration can depend on lifestyle factors such as smoking, age it begins, and race and ethnicity.
Many symptoms are found related to postmenopausal syndrome: Hot flushes, irritability, mood swings, insomnia, dry vagina, difficulty concentrating, mental confusion, stress incontinence, urge incontinence, osteoporotic symptoms, depression, headache, vasomotor symptoms, insomnia etc. They have been discussed below.
As perimenopause causes your hormones to fluctuate, and menopause causes your hormones to decrease, you may experience rapid, unexplainable mood changes. Increased feelings of irritability, nervousness, and sadness may make you feel like you're losing your mind, but there's no need to panic.
While some women feel overly emotional and find that they cry all the time, others can become emotionally detached during perimenopause and menopause.
As with most symptoms of the menopause, loss of confidence may result from the reduction in oestrogen and possibly testosterone. Life events, family changes, relationships and work issues can also have an impact, along with the physical changes of ageing.
Many women report increased forgetfulness and "brain fog" during the menopausal transition. All women eventually undergo menopause, but there is a large age range for when it begins (from late 40s to early 60s), and substantial variation in women's experience of its impact.