What is menopause? In simpler words, menopause is a time of a woman's life where her period stops. It happens because a woman's ovaries stop producing the hormones progesterone and estrogen. A woman's reproductive hormones naturally start declining around her 40s and 50s.
In the U.S. one of the many symptoms that is associated with menopause are hot flashes and night sweats. These symptoms are actually not universal and can vary from different cultures. An anthropologist named Marcha Flint studied 483 women in India and discovered that they did not experience menopausal symptoms. They only experienced menstrual changes, which makes sense as your period stops completely when you go through menopause. Margaret Lock also found out a decade later that Japanese women during menopause experienced shoulder stiffness as symptoms and that hot flashes were very rare. In Hong Kong, on another hand, researchers studied and saw that muscle and joint problems were the main symptoms.
Researchers believed that lifestyle plays a big role as to why these symptoms vary among different cultures around the world. After all lifestyle plays a bigger role in terms of how hormones are affected by it in terms of how we sleep, eat, exercise, etc.
Resources:
Menopause | Menopause Symptoms. (2019, December 19). Retrieved February 9, 2020, from https://medlineplus.gov/menopause.html
Pote, K. (2014, September 19). Menopause Around the World. Retrieved February 9, 2020, from https://womeninbalance.org/2014/09/17/menopause-around-the-world/
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