Menopause and the Mind: The Complete Guide to Coping with the Cognitive Effects of Perimenopause and Menopause Including: +Memory Loss + Foggy Thinking + Verbal Slips - Softcover

Warga, Claire L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684854791 ISBN 13: 9780684854793

Verlag: Atria, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

Are you between the ages of 35 and 60 and having trouble remembering your best friend's phone number? If this sounds familiar to you, take heart: Claire Warga's help and advice are on the way.
In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Warga, a neuropsychologist, identifies the "mind misconnect" syndrome that causes unsettling events during perimenopause and menopause, noting that they are not signs of imminent madness but a natural part of aging.
Drawing upon cutting-edge brain research and many never-before-described cases, Warga provides the first scientific explanation for why the symptoms occur and reveals how they can be reversed or alleviated. She provides a self-assessment test to help readers determine whether they are experiencing "mind misconnect" syndrome and offers important information and advice on estrogen replacement therapy as well as non-hormonal treatments that mimic estrogen's mind-boosting effects. Her self-screening test, symptom chart, and treatment measurement technique are important tools every woman can use to assess her condition and progress over time, with or without her ob/gyn.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Claire Warga, Ph.D., is a New York State -- licensed health psychologist and a researcher in behavioral neuroendocrinology. She trains health and mental health professionals, and women, in midlife research. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Are you between the ages of 35 and 60 and having trouble remembering your best friend's phone number? If this sounds familiar to you, take heart: Claire Warga's help and advice are on the way.

IN this groundbreaking book, Dr. Warga, a neuropsychologist, identifies the "mind misconnect" syndrome that causes unsettling events during perimenopause and menopause, noting that they are not signs of imminent madness but a natural part of aging.

Drawing upon cutting-edge brain research and many never-before-described cases, Warga provides the first scientific explanation for why the symptoms occur and reveals how they can be reversed or alleviated. She provides a self-assessment test to help readers determine whether they are experiencing "mind misconnect" syndrome and offers important information and advice on estrogen replacement therapy as well as non-hormonal treatments that mimic estrogen's mind-boosting effects. Her self-screening test, symptom chart, and treatment measurement technique are important tools every woman can use to assess her condition and progress over time, with or without her ob/gyn.

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Chapter 1

What Are These Strange Symptoms I'm Experiencing in the Middle of My Life?

Mrs. Malaprop: a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1775 play The Rivals. "A...woman of almost fifty [emphasis added] who...is famous for misusing...long words that sound similar to the correct words."

-- Larousse Dictionary of Literary Characters

Malapropisms: the type of verbal errors made by the character Mrs. Malaprop.

There are some topics almost no one talks about till you do first. The stampede for the male impotence drug Viagra unveiled one such topic. This book is about another one: the previously unrecognized cognitive symptoms that are caused by the effects of perimenopause and menopause on the mind.

Sometimes it begins out of the blue with occasional slips of the tongue, meaning to say one word and unexpectedly hearing another pop out. Or when you realize that you, once a champion speller, aren't so sure anymore how to spell "potato" or "forty." Sometimes it begins with uncharacteristically forgetting important appointments or drawing unexpected momentary blanks -- total blanks -- when it comes to remembering your only child's or best friend's name, or how to turn on the computer you've been using for years. Sometimes with feeling mentally "hazy" "foggy," or "spacey" and not being able to clear things up though you need to be "sharp" at that moment. "What's happening to me" you wonder. "Could this be early, early, early Alzheimer's disease or a brain tumor?"

But it is usually not early Alzheimer's disease or a brain tumor. It is something else, a particular set of symptoms -- a syndrome -- that can occur in women beginning in their mid to late thirties or in their forties or fifties that more than likely can be halted and even largely reversed according to the best evidence available today. It is a syndrome associated with estrogen loss that is mainly experienced from within, and that until now, amazingly, no one has recognized as common among women or has linked to the wealth of post-1990s research evidence revealing the many important newly discovered roles estrogen plays in the remembering, naming, and attending parts of the brain. This is research that helps explain why the symptoms occur and why they can often be reversed.

"I'm losing it," women say. "I'm going out of my mind," "I'm falling apart at the seams." "I'm flipping out." "I'm cracking up." "I'm having a nervous breakdown," "I'm just not myself." "I don't know what's wrong with me." "I do the strangest things." "I think I'm getting early Alzheimer's."

These are not the hysterical rantings of women with vague psychosomatic complaints but rather the blanket descriptions frequently used by perimenopausal (women experiencing or undergoing changes associated with the shifting hormonal functioning of the ovaries that precedes the last period. Symptoms can begin four to fifteen years before menopause.) and menopausal (women who have had their last period twelve months ago) women to describe the dislocating experience of confronting an assortment of unpredictable mind, speech, and behavioral "flash" symptoms. These are surprising symptoms no one has ever prepared them for. Physicians hearing these dramatic statements over the years have simply had no basis in training for understanding what they were hearing and as a result have been able to offer no, or minimally constructive, help to women who dared to mention them.

dTHE SYMPTOMS OF PERIMENOPAUSE AND MENOPAUSE CAN BE VERY STRANGE BUT NORMAL

Before describing the specific symptoms I am referring to it makes sense first to agree about certain realities of a perimenopausal/menopausal symptom you already do know something about. Hot flashes. Consider this: If we on earth had never heard of hot flashes as a "normal" midlife symptom associated with ovarian and hormonal changes, and a returning astronaut-discoverer of a twin planet to ours reported drenching, unpredictable, overheating episodes as normal in otherwise healthy midlife-and-older women, we would likely say in quick dismissal, "Go away! You must have gotten something wrong there. The women were probably fooling with you in some way. You couldn't be right. That symptom is just too weird to be true of normal people."

And yet the reality is hot flashes are definitely normal but strange symptoms for healthy women to have. The fact that they are so common makes them seem normal to us. What makes them believable apart from their strangeness is the fact that they are also sometimes observable to others, leaving "tracks" of the internal experience visible to those who don't have them and who might otherwise be inclined to dismiss them as "too crazy" to credit as real.

PERIMENOPAUSAL AND MENOPAUSAL SYMPTOMS CAN OFTEN BE CURED EVEN WHEN NOT FULLY UNDERSTOOD

It's also useful to point out that though science does not yet have a clear consensus on what specific sequence of events produces hot flashes in women -- beyond the bigger picture of changing ovary and estrogen function during perimenopause and menopause -- nevertheless medicine has developed at least one quite effective empirical treatment for hot flashes based on trial-and-error experience, even in the absence of a clear scientific understanding of their basis. Namely, estrogen replacement. (Other remedies that apparently work for some proportion of women have been considerably less tested and proven.) Successful treatment therefore of a symptom associated with ovarian/hormonal changes can precede biological understanding of the full complexity of the symptom.

The broad array of symptoms I have named the WHM Syndrome -- for Warga's Hormonal Misconnection Syndrome -- may at first, I suspect, appear as strange and bizarre as hot flashes do to those unfamiliar with them. But in the years to come, I believe, it will seem one of the great mysteries of our time that such a common, unusual, but apparently typical set of biologically based symptoms could have been overlooked for so long. Cultural and medical historians of the future, I predict, will long ponder the great divide of female patient/doctor non-communication that is implicit in physicians not having "heard" and detected this set of symptoms and its cause in women for so many years.

What WHMS Is Like

The list of possible symptoms I am specifically referring to is presented in Table 1 to help you better understand the cases you will shortly be reading about. (A fuller description of possible WHMS symptoms with examples of how they actually occur in women's lives follows in chapter 7.) In Table 1, however, I list only the mind/speech/attention/ behavioral symptoms to which I have given the name "WHM Syndrome," or "WHMS." This table does not include any of the mood or physical symptoms that are also frequently but not inevitably associated with menopause and the years preceding menopause. (These are more fully described in Appendix I.)

TABLE 1

The WHM Syndrome: Warga's Hormonal Misconnection Syndrome

As you examine the following chart keep in mind that the symptoms below typically occur as brief come-and-go episodes within the context of a functional ongoing nondisabled life, not unlike the manner of hot flashes. Women who experience some of the symptoms need not experience all of the symptoms or even many of the symptoms. Some symptoms may appear similar but are experienced by women as different from each other and are thus listed as distinct, pending additional research. Implied in each symptom is the sense that it occurs with a greater frequency than it did in the past. The symptoms most typically do not occur continuously but in erratic on-and-off intermittent episodes, in the pattern of occurrence of "hot flashes," so...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Atria
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0684854791
• ISBN 13: 9780684854793
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande