The Little Things: Everything you need to know about menopause

Menopause is not just something that impacts older women - in fact, symptoms could start much earlier than you think. Photo / Getty

For many women out there - and quite a lot of men as well - menopause is seen as a phase that women go through at the end of their reproductive cycle, which, if they are lucky, could mean a few months of discomfort and hot flushes before passing on.

However, that’s just one of the myths Niki Bezzant is trying to break when it comes to menopause.

“Menopause is actually technically defined as the day - it’s a one day in time - 12 months after our last period. So if we’d gone through a stage of not having a period for 12 months, then boom, we can say that we are post-menopause.”

What women actually experience in the lead-up to that one big day is perimenopause, a process that many women don’t know a lot about - including Bezzant, who had no idea it was a condition until she started researching her book, This Changes Everything: The Honest Guide to Menopause and Perimenopause.

Speaking to Francesca Rudkin and Louise Ayrey on the new Herald podcast, The Little Things, Bezzant said one of the other common misconceptions is that this period only lasts for a short time, when in reality it could be two to 10 years, with more symptoms linked to it than previously thought.

“I think a big myth is that it’s really just about hot flushes and, and a bit of weight gain and grumpiness, and that’s it,” Bezzant said. “And we know now that there are multiple symptoms of perimenopause - over 40 of them, and the lists seem to keep going up all the time. So there are a lot of things that we might not think are related to our hormonal health, which are all part of this big perimenopause upheaval.”

Author and journalist Niki Bezzant. Photo / Supplied

With the increased understanding on perimenopause and menopause, there is also more information on how it can be treated, and Bezzant wants women to know they don’t need to suffer in silence.

“For really two decades, HRT [Hormone Replacement Treatment], has had a really unfounded, bad reputation. And it stems back to a big piece of research that was done in the early 2000s, and the study was halted prematurely in 2000, because of a perceived risk or association between HRT and breast cancer.

“The way that that study was interpreted and then subsequently reported was really unfortunate and actually incorrect. But the result of that was that woman threw away their HRT, doctors stopped prescribing it because they thought that it was dangerous.

“And so for really 20 years since then, a couple of generations of women have really been left out in the cold to cope on their own.”

Bezzant said that the research has been re-examined, and we now know that HRT is really effective.

She said there are other treatments that people can use, including non-hormonal treatments, so women no longer have to “tough it out”. There is still work to be done on normalising discussion around menopause, including in the workplace, but there is more knowledge than ever before.

“I want everyone to read the book. I want men, women, all genders to read and understand more about this topic because then it becomes something that’s just normal. Because it is normal,” Bezzant said.

“It is a normal, natural, temporary transition that we go through and it is just one phase in our life, and we’ve got probably half of our life maybe to live after this.”

Listen to the full podcast for more tips on diagnosing perimenopausal symptoms, what menopause does to your body, ways to treat it, and how can we normalise the conversation further.

The Little Things is available on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are available on Saturdays.