Dr. Vonda Wright Solocast: Understanding the Musculoskeletal Syndrome of Menopause

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:03)
Hi, I'm Dr. Vonda Wright, and this is HOT For Your Health. Join us for conversations on the bleeding edge of science, health, and culture, as we bring you tech innovators, thought leaders, and the movers and shakers who are transforming science fiction into your new health reality.
Hi, everybody, I'm Dr. Vonda Wright, and welcome to HOT For Your Health. Today's episode is a solo cast. It's just me and a couple of my community listening. And today we're going to be talking about a topic that is so exciting that 175,000 people have downloaded the article that I'm going to be talking about today in one month. So welcome to HOT For Your Health, the podcast for innovators, movers and shakers, and people fascinated with life and science. So I'm glad to have you here. You know, this is episode 98 I have been doing this for a little while, and most podcasts do not last more than 10 episodes. So I'm really excited that we're getting to 100 What really helps us is if you subscribe, so that you never miss any of my amazing guests, and then leave a review. Most weeks, we're in the top 10 or 20 in the medicine category. So that's just a little housekeeping. So listen, those that are new to this podcast, I am Dr. Vonda Wright. I am a double board certified orthopedic sports surgeon, and my life sits at the intersection of sports medicine and performance, aging and longevity, and the third bubble of my Venn diagram is the health of a woman. So in these three bubbles, I take care of everybody from birth to death, men and women, athletes and non-athletes, people who want to be athletes, but everybody I had talked to is fascinated with life, is a curious mind and wants to learn. And I'm so thankful for all of you. So today, I'm talking about an article. I'm showing it to the people who are watching called The Musculoskeletal Syndrome of Menopause. So I'm an academic surgeon, meaning not only do I see patients and teach residents and fellows, but I also do research and I write and I have my entire career. So as I entered into the paramenopause and menopause space, it became blaringly apparent to me that we needed a way to talk about what happens to our bodies when estrogen walks out the door from a musculoskeletal perspective because things like hot flashes, brain fog, night sweats, those things are common and people know what that is when it hits you. But people often don't know what it means when out of nowhere, your body hurts so much that it's hard to get out of bed. People are definitely plagued by frozen shoulder, which means that out of nowhere again, you didn't hit your shoulder on the door. You didn't fall down. Your shoulder hurts excruciatingly. You can't sleep at night, and frankly, it doesn't move. One of the cute things I like to say is, listen, you can't unhook your bra. You failed the unhook-your-bra test. Those things, along with multiple other things, including loss of lean muscle mass, which is called sarcopenia, loss of bone density, osteoporosis, rapid increase in the incidence of arthritis, the failing of our stem cells, not to mention the 30 pounds we gain as adipose tissue shifts and moves from our hips to our visceral fat, and we become insulin-sensitive. All those things, the five or six things I just said, and I'll go over them again, I put into a nomenclature called the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause. The reason I did that was for several reasons. Number one, we had to have a way to talk about it. You know, lots of women would walk into my clinic on Mondays and Thursdays, and they start to tell me about their shoulders, which wouldn't move. And without very long, they would say to me, you know, Dr. Wright, I feel like I'm falling apart, and some days I think I'm going crazy. And for me, that was happening so often and so often, I started digging deep into, you know, estrogen has got to be the common reason. And so I did a huge lit search and started putting the pieces together. And I realized that if a woman goes into a doctor's office, especially an orthopedic surgeon's office, or their primary care, or their OB-GYN, and they say, my total body hurts, my shoulder doesn't move, I'm getting weaker, I fractured my leg, all these things, five or six things, sometimes that's overwhelming, and they would not be heard. But we decided if we put it all together into a nomenclature that made sense, it would equip the women, it would equip the doctor. And so what I'm going to do today is go over each one of these hearts of the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause and give you language to talk to your doctor about. If you are a physician, I encourage you to not only, or if you're anyone, I encourage you to go download this paper. If I made it open access, meaning we paid the journal so that everybody could download it, and go Google musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause, it's the first thing that comes up besides the AI description of what it is. I encourage you to do that. Print it, read it, share it. 175,000 of you already had. So I'm thankful for those of you who are joining me tonight on this live podcast recording of HOT For Your Health, as we discuss the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause. But first, I want to acknowledge my team. You know, great research is done in teams of people. So although I am the primary senior author, I could not have done this without my co-attending author, Dr. Jocelyn Whitstein, who is an attending at Duke, also interested in the topics of musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause. And two students. The first student is a rock star medical student, doctor, or soon to be doctor, Jonathan Schwartzman, who really did the yeoman's work putting this paper together. And then my college student, now a medical student, soon to be Dr. Rafael Inochi. I-T-I-N-O-C-H-E. You should go look him up because he will be publishing a lot soon. That is my team. I am so thankful for all the hard work you always do to produce research with me. So okay, the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause. But let's frame this. Approximately 2 million women in the United States and 47 million worldwide will enter menopause between 45 and 55 Now listen, menopause transition, and I'm going to describe it to you, can start when you're 35 It can extend into your mid-50s, but the average day of menopause is when you're 52 And I just want to define it a little bit. Menopause is one day. It is the 366th day after your last period. Prior to that, you're in either pre-menopause, meaning you are regularly cycling, you're probably less than 40, and then you enter perimenopause when the number of eggs you have left in your ovaries is less than 1 percent. And therefore, the estrogen that your eggs produce becomes less regulated than a monthly predictable cycle.