Dr. Mary Claire Haver

You start reaching for things.

These are all psychological changes that happen throughout the menopause transition.

Next question, what are the actual health risks if these metabolic changes go unaddressed?

We see some pretty scary statistics.

Cardiovascular risk doubles across the menopause transition.

So premenopausal women enjoy a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than their male counterparts.

And one of the key factors we think that is leading to being healthier in a premenopausal woman versus her male twin, right?

is that she has more estrogen on board, which is giving her that level of protection.

It's lowering her inflammation levels, it's keeping her blood vessels more flexible, and it's decreasing the rate at which she can develop atherosclerosis.

Once that estrogen protection goes away, we see her quickly meet the risk of amends by the time she's 60 and then surpass him.

We see increasing rates of diabetes, which again is another risk factor for heart disease.

We see insulin resistance really start increasing across the menopause transition.

We've really treated menopause like a footnote instead of a pivot point for metabolic health.

So a lot of you are asking, okay, well, do I just need to get on hormone therapy and that's going to fix everything?

No.

No, I wish I could tell you just take your HRT and everything's going to be fine for most of you.

That is, it's going to be helpful, but it's not going to be everything.

You are going to have to double down on your lifestyle in order to avoid some of these risks and stay as healthy as possible for as long as you possibly can.

And fortunately, when we adopt a lot of these behaviors,

it affects multiple disease risk states.