When was menopause discovered

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The History of Menopause. You Might Also Enjoy The book gives accounts from the mids in England of doctors prescribing a pre-meal mixture of carbonated soda.

Other remedies included a large belladonna plaster placed at the pit of the stomach and vaginal injections with a solution of acetate of lead. No wonder women were reduced to hysteria! Prescriptions ranged from opium and hydochlorate of morphine to chloric ether and distilled water. Before , treatments for menopausal symptoms primarily consisted of herbals, along with a selection of belladonna, cannabis or opium.

Guess these women got more bong for their buck! In the s Merck offered these chemicals along with the flavored powder Ovariin for the treatment of menopausal symptoms and other ovarian ills. Ovariin was made by dessicating and pulverizing cow ovaries, and may have been the first substance commercially available for treatment of menopausal symptoms derived from animal sources.

Testicular juice also was used as a treatment. I'm not going there! In the s, menopause was described as a deficiency disease. Emminen became commercially available in Diethylstilbestrol DES was first marketed in as a far more potent estrogen than Emminen. In , Ayerst Laboratories began marketing Premarin, which would eventually become the most popular form of estrogen replacement therapy in the U.

Luckily, treatment of menopausal symptoms today is considerably more sophisticated than the remedies of yesteryear. Different forms of HRT and many non-hormonal options are available. The North American Menopause Society has published the first comprehensive set of guidelines that support clinicians involved in the care of women at midlife. The evidence-based recommendations have been published in the October issue of Menopause.

One thing that hasn't changed over the years is that women are still suffering from the symptoms of perimenopause and menopause. Today, at least we have many more treatment options to choose from.

Whether the treatment is a plaster of belladonna or getting plastered at the bar, I'd say we've come a long way! We've gone from the days of hysteria to the days of hysterical, with productions such as "Menopause the Musical. For more by Ellen Dolgen, click here. For more on women's health, click here. Ellen Dolgen is an outspoken women's health and wellness advocate, menopause awareness expert, author, and speaker.

After struggling with her own severe menopause symptoms and doing years of research, Ellen resolved to share what she learned from experts and her own trial and error.

The news was uplifting: menopause may be a good thing for the species. But the anthropologist's work carried a downside as well. She named her idea "The Grandmother Hypothesis. Will I learn patience and pie-baking? Doctors talk about the perimenopause , those years and we're talking five, more or less of fluctuating fertility, when a woman's once punctual periods start wandering over the days and weeks.

When it comes, the blood may gush—a sign frighteningly like that of some cancers. Just the irregularity of it all takes some getting used to. Especially when no one can tell you why. Mathematics, oddly, may give women that validation: mathematics and almost a quarter of a million urine samples.

Mansfield is a psychologist, a health educator, and a scholar of women's studies. She has a reassuring manner and a soothing voice, yet she's effusive and energetic when talking about what drives her; for an activist she's unusually optimistic. She offered me chocolate when I came to her office: someone baked brownies for a birthday treat. When she spoke of her new project she sat very still.

I want to help women. I want to help women manage a very scary transition—and it's scary because they don't know what to expect. There's no overwhelming technical reason why she shouldn't be able to do this. His gestures are large, his vocabulary lively. He does professorial stuff: writes flow charts on the blackboard, knits his fingers behind his head, yet he can discuss without blushing such things as breastfeeding and menstrual blood.

His research landed him in New Guinea, just out of graduate school, collecting urine and trying to unravel, by reading hormonal signs, why women are sometimes fertile, sometimes not, why their cycles suddenly end. Darryl Holman was one of Wood's graduate students and is now a postdoctoral fellow in the lab. He rivals Wood's enthusiasm and though a younger man, beats him hands down on length of beard , but his is a more gentle, inquiring manner.

He's quick to blame his own bad assumptions for the trick his data from Bangladesh played on him. With a team of Bangladeshi field workers, he collected 20, urine samples one year. He was assessing rates of fetal loss—how often women became pregnant but lost the fetus before they knew it—and menopause factored into his tests. There'd been a study in the early "80s in this same area, and it found the mean age at menopause was That's on the low end, but it's consistent with studies of menopause in developing countries," the theory being that menopause has something to do with poor nutrition or stress.

It's hooey. I went back and reviewed the literature very carefully, and in all the studies that showed a really early age at menopause, the statistical analyses were flawed.

Statistical analyses are Holman's cup of tea. He talked of being "the statistical interpreter" of the menopause group, of being interested in "building etiologic models, mechanistic models, of how we think the biology is working," of being "quite proud of the follicular depletion model" that he and Wood have developed to explain menopause.

O'Connor, also a postdoc, actually runs the lab. She's the one who has to go down to Walmart to collect the clipboards, Tupperware freezer containers, and styrofoam boxes.

She's the one who'll be in charge of packing and sending the stuff out to the women volunteers and organizing hormonal assays on the quarter of a million urine samples they return. She's assayed her own urine as well. There's a quickness, a cut-to-the-chase efficiency about O'Connor that's lacking in the other three Penn Staters on the team. She sorted through a stack of files looking for something, grabbed a napkin when she couldn't come up with a blank scrap to draw a diagram on. She showed me the chart: two hormones fluctuating like out-of-sync waves across a span of 30 days.

You learn what your body is doing. It's a reward in itself. The "other people," in this case, are a group of to to year-old women selected from the Tremin Trust Menstruation and Reproductive History Program. Beginning in , when Alan Treloar of the University of Minnesota enrolled the women of cohort 1, and continuing with the women of cohort 2, who were recruited in the s and "70s, the Tremin Trust women have kept menstrual calendars, recording the beginning and ending dates of each of their periods on a standardized card and, on its reverse, any "unusual events" that might have affected their cycles, such as pregnancies, births, abortions, surgeries, illnesses, use of medication, or lapses in their record-keeping.

A year-end health report recorded their living arrangements and household composition, education, medical and smoking histories, exercise routines, and sources of stress or support. Most of what we know about age patterns of menstruation, including during the menopausal transition, is based upon the Tremin Trust sample.

Mansfield met Ann Voda, current director of the Tremin Trust, at a conference the year after the Trust moved to the University of Utah in Both were asking questions about the menstrual cycle: "Not medicalizing," Mansfield said, "but asking different questions, saying, What do women experience? We were not making assumptions that menstrual events were signs of illness. They may be different from what women experience at other times, but not illness.

In , the two started a study using a subset of the Tremin Trust women, those aged 35 to 55 who were still menstruating. They focused on heavy bleeding. Women do notice if their period is longer or shorter, but what they most notice is this heavy bleeding. They felt they had been so much better informed by being in the project," Mansfield noted. Some had listed Edith Bunker of TV's "All in the Family" as one of their chief sources of information before joining the study.

I can't talk to my physician about this , one said. Another: Two doctors told me when I asked about when to expect menopause, "Ask your mother. A third: My mother told me nothing about the menstrual cycle or menopause. It was hush-hush. Independently of Mansfield, Wood and Maxine Weinstein had contacted Voda about using the Tremin Trust to look at the hormonal profile over menopause.

But it took several rewrites before a federal agency agreed to fund it. We were able to show the government that we did have a method women would easily comply with. It's not a method easy on the lab.

It'll open a window into the biology. Each woman will get a pound "urine collection kit" each year: "urine collection devices" one a day for six months, then she can take a six-month break , a plastic freezer storage case, sheets of labels, sealing tape, seven 8-ounce refrigerant gel packs one extra for travel , six postpaid polyfoam mailing boxes, and an instruction sheet on a clipboard.

The easy-to-use urine collection device, which Holman hopes to patent, obviates the need for the subject to process urine in any way, e. Each morning, the woman collects her own urine, seals the vial, attaches that day's sample identification number to the vial, and then places it into the plastic container provided for storing the specimens in her freezer. On the label she does "a little bit of record-keeping," noting if she's menstruating, taking birth control pills, eating large amounts of soy protein "Some studies find an effect on the hormones we're looking at," said O'Connor.

The urine in each aliquot will be used in four hormone assays, testing for forms of estradiol, progesterone, follicle-stimulating hormone FSH , and luteinizing hormone LH. At 36 samples per plate, 30 plates at a time, we'll be doing about 1, samples a week. A robotic pipetter will do a lot of the work for us," she added. But it will still be an enormous amount of work. That's why other people haven't done this before.