Each day in the United States, about 6,000 women make the final transition through menopause, which comes to about 2 million women a year. This number doesn't include the millions more women who are making the journey through the lead-up period — perimenopause.
Wherever you fall on this hormonal transition, you’re feeling the effects of your reproductive hormone swings and you’d like to learn about some management strategies.
Well, you’ve come to the right place. At our practice, not only is Dr. Karen F. Brodman a board-certified gynecologist, she is also a Menopause Society Certified Practitioner. Dr. Brodman helps her patients navigate the often challenging transitions in reproductive health, which very much includes perimenopause and menopause.
To give you an idea about some of the solutions for easing perimenopause and menopause, we outline five strategies for handling some of the more common side effects below.
If you’re finding the lead-up period to menopause — perimenopause — to be a bumpy ride, we can smooth this transitional phase with hormone medications. For example, we can try common birth control methods, such as the pill, to help balance your reproductive hormones to keep your perimenopause symptoms to a minimum.
Once you’ve no longer had periods for 12 months in a row, you’ve officially entered menopause. To help manage the range of side effects that comes with the sudden drop in reproductive hormones, we can try menopause hormone therapy.
This systemic approach to menopause replenishes your reproductive hormone levels to offset common symptoms like hot flashes, vaginal dryness, bone loss, and more.
Whether you’re in menopause or perimenopause, if you’re struggling with hot flashes and night sweats, which we group under vasomotor symptoms, you’re not alone — this particular side effect strikes about 75% of women.
If you want to turn down the heat on your hot flashes without turning to hormone medications, we’ve got you covered with prescription medications that only address vasomotor symptoms.
Your sexual and vaginal health can be impacted because of perimenopause or menopause. For example, vaginal dryness affects about half of women during this hormonal transition.
We can target vaginal dryness with hormone medications that you apply directly to your vaginal tissues to restore their lubrication and elasticity.
Putting medications aside, there’s a lot that you can do on your own to ease the transition through perimenopause and menopause, which can affect your physical and mental health.
Some great practices include:
We also recommend keeping your sex life active. In fact, when it comes to your vaginal health, regular intercourse can protect against vaginal atrophy.
We’re happy to sit down with you to figure out which perimenopause and menopause symptoms are causing the most trouble and how we can remedy them. To get started, you can schedule an appointment with Dr. Brodman at our office on the Upper West Side of New York City today.
