Dr. Sarah Berry

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566 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 18 Dec

Dr. Sarah Berry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Dhru Purohit Show · Why Women Struggle with Insomnia, Weight Gain, and Debilitating Symptoms During Perimenopause and Menopause and What to Do About It with Dr. Sarah Berry · 6 Nov 2024 podcast

Now, some of the symptoms were reduced to a greater extent than other symptoms. So there's some symptoms that diet seemed to have a bigger impact. So particularly the psychological symptoms, diet seem to have the biggest impact. So these symptoms are, for example, the mood swings, the irritability, the anxiety, as well as some of the other cognitive conditions like memory loss.

Oh, and now I'm forgetting. Every time I say the word memory loss, my memory loss part of my brain comes in. But that's where we seem to have the biggest impact for improving diet. What we also did is we did a deep dive into looking at individual dietary components.

So having seen that on average, if you're following a healthy diet, you experience about a 35% reduction in your symptoms, which is a huge, this is on average across all of the different symptoms, but some being greater than the other. We also saw that that reduction was of the same size, whether you were taking HRT or not, because this is something people often ask.

Again, because we had such a big cohort, we could adjust for lots of different variables. We could adjust, does this differ depending on whether you're on HRT or not on HRT? Those on HRT are obviously coming from a lower starting point in terms of how many symptoms they have and how burdensome the symptoms are.

But what we found was that even if you're taking HRT, you still get this big improvement in symptoms when you follow this overall healthier diet. And then when we started to drill down into individual components, and we haven't published this yet, this is quite new analysis. What we found was that there were some foods that were associated with reduction in quite a number of symptoms.

So we saw, for example, seeds and nuts. They were associated with a lot lower prevalence of symptoms. We see that fruits and vegetables as well were associated with lower prevalence of symptoms. And we saw that some dairy products, so for example, the fermented dairy products like the whole yogurts and cheeses were also associated with lower prevalence. symptoms.

And then conversely, we saw that some of the starchy refined foods. So starchy, refined carbohydrate foods like white breads, white rice, white pasta are associated with greater symptoms and that some of the quite heavily processed foods that are high in sugar or high in kind of saturated fat were associated with more prevalence of symptoms.

So nothing kind of surprising in terms of it's kind of just going in a direction of a healthier dietary pattern. The strongest association was the seeds and the nuts. which I think is really interesting. But I wouldn't say there was a silver bullet as such that came out. But we're still crunching some of the numbers. This isn't published yet, this data.

Yeah. So having done all of this work, looking at how many symptoms people had and the impact that they had on their quality of life, we started to learn what was really important. What were the most troublesome symptoms? And we started to also reflect and look at what questionnaires are out there. The questionnaires that are out there are developed in the 70s, for example.

So they're 30, 50 years old. They're using quite what I think is inaccessible language. I mean, they ask Questions like, what is your excitability levels? Now, as a female, if I was asked that, I would probably want to punch my GP, my doctor, for asking me that. You know, they were developed at a time where things were very different for women.

And so what we wanted to do is we wanted to develop a questionnaire that was informed by our science, that covered the most prevalent symptoms, that was user friendly, that used modern language, but that also assessed the impact that the symptoms were having on their quality of life. And so we developed this questionnaire and it's got 20 questions.

These are what we find are the most common symptoms. So 20 different symptoms that we ask about. And then for each symptom, people tell us from a scale of zero to five, how much it impacts their quality of life. And then out of that, they get a score of 100 because you've got the 20 symptoms and the grading of five. And that grading of five, I think, is really important because

rather than just adding up the number of symptoms, because you could kind of have an endless number of symptoms, you know, because the oestrogen affects so much, as I said earlier, of our body, it's important to recognise what's the overall burden that menopause is having on you. And that's what that scale of zero to 100 gives to us.

And so, for example, if you're having really problematic sleep issues because of the menopause, that can affect everything. The next day can affect what you're eating, how much physical activity, your mood, your anxiety, your interactions with other people, your work, for example. If, however, you're experiencing problems with your hair and skin, which is a very common symptom,

It's unlikely probably for most people to have the same level of impact on your quality of life as just not sleeping due to menopause. So that's why we wanted to specifically look at what's the overall impact it has on your quality of life. So the Menoscale calculator gives you a score out of 100. It's available online. It's free to access for everyone.

And what's really important is it allows you to track your symptoms. And I think this is key because there's nothing out there that people can quickly access that returns a number that allows them to track their symptoms. And so, again, you know, when I think back to my own experience, a couple of years ago, when I started on the perimenopausal transition, I went to see my family doctor.

And they said, right, before you start taking HRT, track your symptoms, then we'll start you on HRT, then you track your symptoms. There was no way of tracking it. They told me I could go and look at this green scale, which asks me all of these, what I think using these outdated language. On a piece of paper, I was having to write down how I was feeling.

The bit paper got lost in my kid's homework or something or somewhere at some point. And so the purpose of this is to create something that allows women to track, allows women to track in a consistent way by asking the same questions and as frequently as they want to. So what it means is it enables women to be able to work out what works for them.

So if they're put on HRT, so hormone replacement therapy, they contract to say, okay, is it helping? If they decide to make a dietary change, What's helping? Is it helping? How much is it helping? And because they're getting this score out of 100, what we also play back to individuals is how their score compares to an average person of their age, and depending on whether they're on HRT or not.

And then we also play back other information about what their most common symptoms are and how that compares to the general population. So by completing this Menos scale, women can be empowered to understand how menopause is impacting them and if any changes they're making are helping.

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