Moment 160: Menopause Expert: They're Not Telling You The Full Truth! "No Ones Talking About This": Mary Claire Haver

Mary Claire Haver (0:03)

No one's talking about this. No one's talking about the multi-organ system failure that a lot of women are going through, and they're suffering in silence, and physicians aren't helping, we're not trained, we need to bring it to the forefront.

Steven Bartlett (0:17)

For people that don't understand menopause, they might think that it's a small issue affecting a small group of people. But how many women are affected currently by perimenopause, and postmenopause?

Mary Claire Haver (0:30)

Sure. So right now, about a third of the female population of the world is in peri, or postmenopause. You do not, it's not optional. All of us go through it. And because we have such individual expressions of how it affects our bodies, what we know now is that there are estrogen receptors in every organ system of our body. And when those levels start declining, we see a very wide variety of a spectrum of syndrome where it used to just be thought it was a few hot flashes and some night sweats. Maybe your sleep's disrupted. Your genital urinary system is gonna take a hit. Your bones are gonna get weaker. But what we know now is how much it's affecting our mental health, our capabilities, our skin, our bones, our kidneys, vertigo, tinnitus, frozen shoulder. Anytime I post about those on social media, the internet explodes. And women by the thousands are like, oh my God, I had no idea. You know, and just the validation piece was so huge for them to make, because they've been dismissed for so long and told it's all in their head.

Steven Bartlett (1:35)

And if we think about from sort of period to post-menopause, what is that sort of typical, and I know that's a tricky word to use, but what is the sort of average typical age range? And then also what is the sort of more possible age range? So it could start between this age and this age.

Mary Claire Haver (1:51)

So in the US and in most of Europe, the average age of menopause, which means one year after your last menstrual period, is 51 Perimenopause, which is when your body recognizes there's some declining estrogen levels and you're beginning to be symptomatic, can start seven to 10 years before that. So normal menopause is still 45 to 55 And so if you do the math and back that up seven to 10 years, it is completely reasonable for a 35-year-old woman to begin to experience some of the symptoms of perimenopause.

Steven Bartlett (2:25)

So let's start with what is it? And I would love you to explain this to me like I'm a 10-year-old. Because I'm sure there's some people that are both men and women that aren't flea.

Mary Claire Haver (2:35)

So we're going to talk about gonads, right?

Steven Bartlett (2:37)

What's gonads?

Mary Claire Haver (2:37)

Gonads are where our... So in men, it's the testes. And where you're making your genetic material, where you're making sperm, right?

And in a female, it's going to be ovaries, her ovaries. So the difference, big differences between male and female and how that process happens is that males make their genetic material fresh constantly the minute they go through puberty until basically they die unless they have some medical issue. Females, on the other hand, our eggs develop while we're in utero in our mothers. So while we're in the womb, she's five months pregnant with us, we have our maximum eggs that we're ever going to have.

And those are meant to last us until we go through menopause. And so they lay dormant until we go through puberty and then they wake up again and we start ovulating. So we have this monthly in a healthy person, cyclical hormones rise and ebb and flow with our cycles each month. We have a period, you get pregnant, you don't get pregnant, and the whole process starts over again. Well, because we're born with that egg supply, through time we're decreasing the amount and the quality of those eggs. So when a woman hits the age of 30, she is down to about 10 percent of the egg supply that she had at birth. And when she's 40, it's down to about 3 percent. And so, and it gets harder and harder for that ebb and flow of the natural hormones to do its job. And we start seeing fluctuations in her periods, and then organ systems that are beginning to notice the lack of estrogen. Estrogen is a really powerful anti-inflammatory hormone in most of our body systems. So the Musculoskeletal Syndrome of Menopause is really starting to be talked about quite a bit now. And we're looking at things like frozen shoulder, our througes, generalized aches and pains. And most physicians aren't aware of this. You know, most know about hot flashes and night sweats and sleep disruption. But now that we're really opening the conversation as to how many organ systems are affected, we are seeing people coming out of the woodwork, just so happy to know that they're not crazy and they're being validated.