Menopause - A Nineteenth-century Term, A New Era, Better Studies Needed
estrogen stage
Menopause is the stage in the female life cycle during which menstrual cycles stop. On average, menopause occurs at age 51, and generally takes from five to seven years from start to finish. For years, the menopausal stage was rarely talked about in public. Beginning in the 1960s, physicians began treating menopause aggressively as a medical problem, using estrogen hormones. Contemporary debate focuses on the wisdom of long-term estrogen use and the search for the best way to address problems linked to menopause.
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Menopause has always been a part of natural life for women, and the history of medicine is littered with references to the period when women stop bearing children. The Greek philosopher Aristotle noted that women stop giving birth after the age of 50. But little was written about ways to ease women through the symptoms of menopause, which include hot flashes, night sweats, insomnia, and vaginal dr…
The 1923 isolation of estrogen, the female sex hormone manufactured in both sexes, lead to a new era for menopausal women. Estrogens were first tried as an aid to menopausal women in the 1930s, but negative side affects cut short the effort. By the 1960s, a palatable estrogen supplement was developed. The substance was heavily promoted as a medication to keep menopausal women "feminine fore…
Virtually millions of women must decide how best to approach the symptoms of menopause and life after menopause every year. There were 473 million women 50 or over in the world in 1990. But relatively little research has been conducted concerning the long-term health consequences of estrogen or estrogen and progesterone therapy in women or about other ways to address menopausal symptoms. There has…
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