heart health & (peri)menopause
Did you know that cardiovascular health can change during the (peri)menopause transition? I didn’t!
In one of the first (and favorite) books I read, The Menopause Manifesto by Dr. Jen Gunter, she lays it out very clearly. I highly recommend downloading it on Audible, borrowing it from a friend, or ordering from her site. Until you do that, I’ll recap some of what I’ve learned so far.
Cardiovascular disease or CVD is super diverse. Think beyond heart attacks. CVD includes angina, arrhythmias, atherosclerosis, heart attack, heart failure, hypertension, peripheral artery disease and stroke (ischemic). I’ve included definitions for each of these in the “helpful resources” section of my page.
Symptoms show up differently in women than they do in men. It’s not always the grab your heart, chest or jaw pain, something’s going down type of activity that we’ve seen depicted through various mediums. For women it could be:
“…shortness of breath, fatigue, body aches, cold sweats, palpitations, weakness, and unusual sensations (that are hard to describe) in the back or arms. Sleep disturbances and severe fatigue with no explanation for several days or even weeks in the days and weeks before the heart attack can occur.”
The scary thing (yes, this is mostly a scary post) is that CVD is the #1 cause of death amongst women. From a ratio standpoint, that means 1 in 3 women die from CVD. Not to knock breast cancer or anything—I’ve had it twice and still going through chemo—but 1 in 8 women are diagnosed with breast cancer. A breast cancer diagnosis is terrifying but so many more of us are impacted by CVD!!!
So why is this the case?
Well cis-women’s risk for CVD increases after menopause because we can start to hold on to visceral fat—belly fat—likely related to lower levels of estrogen. Estrogen plays a role in where fat is located in the body.
It happens to all of us so it can be easy to overlook and downplay some of the symptoms that serve as precursors to cardiovascular disease.
Dr. Gunter does a beautiful job laying out the risk factors and what to do about it in her book, so I’ll finish how I started. Pick it up!
In the meanwhile, the unsexy tactics of eating a healthy diet, cutting down sugary drinks (this is so hard for me—I love boba), and lifting weights throughout the menopause transition—peri included—are going to be the best way to get that 1 in 3 ratio down!
