I’m a 41 years old female and I have PPM. A good friend of mine was part of this webinar about menopause which I feel is something important to share because I blame all my symptoms on MS. So please take a look, I hope it supports someone out there.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Go2J0hZk3os
That is a very good webinar. Thanks for drawing it to our attention. At last we are seeing an awareness.
I had to really fight for bio-identical HRT about 10 years ago. My female GP knew nothing about it - no-one else had asked for it! I’d done my research and also knew I had to over-emphasise hot sweats as that was the only symptom they were allowed to prescribe full HRT for. They were still under very strong pressure to deny prescribing HRT, due to the very flawed research from the US that incorrectly linked HRT with cancer. They are at last recognising some of the other symptoms, though there are still too many doctors still in the dark, or who still remember that research. My current GPs are now very aware of the positive sides of HRT, and now go for the bioidentical as a matter of course! So things have changed!
The HRT brought my neurological condition (dystonia) under much better control.
I’m sure there are quite a few symptoms in women with MS of menopause / perimenopause that get attributed to their MS rather than the actual cause, and therefore end up not being treated appropriately, but just left to flounder, or are given inappropriate meds.
I also think that there’s a significant number of women who develop neurological symptoms, but that their doctors are not recognising they could be peri / menopause, and so send them for fruitless neurological consultations and tests that end up with no answers, and then get dismissed by neurologists as just anxious, hypochondriacs etc.
Also, oestrogen (properly balanced) is very neuroprotective. Too little, and also too much is neurologically damaging. Still far too many neurologists seem unaware of the connection between hormones and neurological conditions. On the otherhand there are, of course, a few misogynist neurologists who, when they see a middle-aged woman walk in to a consultation, jump straightaway to ‘neurotic menopausal woman’ without evening listening to the woman or doing a proper physical test …
1 Like
Glad you commented on this. I’ve got an appointment with my GP to discuss HRT, as life is hard enough living with MS and then you add this on top! Fingers crossed they listen and not put it down to neurological MS symptoms.
Don’t know if you spotted the other recent thread and Whammel’s link to a relevant article by Gavin Giovannoni? It might be worth printing it out ready to hand to your GP if they are not being very helpful!