10:05 AM
Anonymous
When Amanda Warne’s periods stopped at the age of 21, doctors put it down to stress and over-training following an intensive diet and exercise regimen.
For the next four years she suffered terrifying mood swings and depression and paid countless visits to her GP and a specialist — while a series of blood tests revealed see-sawing hormone levels.
Finally, doctors concluded the sporty student had suffered a premature menopause.
Blood tests showed her levels of key hormones were such that she had been through the menopause — and it wasn’t clear why.
‘I couldn’t believe it,’ says Amanda.
‘I was studying at the London College of Fashion and was with my first boyfriend, the love of my life, who was desperate for children.
‘He told me bluntly he knew he wouldn’t be able to stay with me for ever because his desire for children would always outgrow the love he had for me.
'I became an insecure wreck and felt worthless.’
She also found herself crippled with mood swings, depression, panic attacks and bouts of exhaustion — classic menopausal symptoms.
‘Some days I could barely crawl out of bed. I felt as though I was going mad.
'I knew something had really changed in my body, but no one seemed to listen,’ says Amanda, now 33 and a businesswoman living in North London.
Taking Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) improved her quality of life, but Amanda still suffers exhaustion, low libido, headaches and a tingling sensation in her head.
She finds the latter particularly worrying following the publication of alarming new research last week by U.S.
doctors who discovered that women who go through a premature menopause are also more likely to suffer a potentially fatal brain haemorrhage, a cerebral aneurysm.
This occurs when part of the artery weakens and swells.
The artery can then burst and cause a stroke or death, with half of those suffering a cerebral aneurysm likely to die.
And the younger a woman is when she becomes menopausal, the greater the chances of a cerebral aneurysm — Amanda went through the menopause 30 years before the average age of 51.
‘I do realise I may be facing a shortened life expectancy,’ she says.
The new U.S. research is part of a growing body of evidence pointing to the staggering toll on a woman’s overall health associated with early menopause — a concern because more women are being diagnosed with the disorder.
Most scientists define a premature menopause, or premature ovarian failure (POF), as occurring when a woman’s ovaries stop working before the age of 40, though some studies include women up to the age of 45.
As well as cerebral aneurysm, they are also at greater risk of heart disease — they are 50 per cent more likely to die and 80 per cent more likely to suffer from heart disease than women who go through the menopause between the ages of 52 to 55.
A study last year by Imperial College London found that women who had early menopause were also twice as likely to have a poor quality of life in health terms.
Another study, by the Mayo Clinic in the U.S., found that affected women had a greater risk of dying early, developing heart disease, neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, psychiatric disorders and osteoporosis.
Women were particularly likely to die early or develop heart disease if they’d not been taking HRT following their early menopause, said the researchers.
‘These recent studies are telling us what we have suspected for some time, but until now no one has done the work to quantify it,’ says Dr Kevin Harrington, a consultant gynaecologist at the Bupa Cromwell Hospital in London.
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