Menopause fog

Menopause is a time of transition and change for a woman. It can be liberating and a powerful rite of passage but it can also be distressing. Physical symptoms like hot flushes can be debilitating for some women but there are also other less tangible challenges. Some women going through menopause talk of difficulties with memory and thought processes and now new research suggests that this is no imagined malady but is very real.

You will have heard of “baby brain”, the fuzzy thinking and mildly impaired memory that many expectant mothers experience. Well, according to researchers from the University of Rochester and University of Illinois “menopause fog” is an equally common and just as troubling condition for women at a different stage of life.

The research included women aged between 40 and 60 who were either approaching menopause or in it. The women were given tests to measure cognitive skills including their ability to learn and retain new information, to mentally manipulate new information, and to maintain their attention over time. Additionally, the women were evaluated for menopause symptoms including depression, anxiety, hot flushes, and sleep difficulties. Their blood levels of hormones like oestradiol and FSH (follicle stimulating hormone) were also measured.

The results showed that some types of memory were being affected but not others.

Women who were experiencing memory problems more likely to do badly in tests of “working memory”, that is, the ability to take in information and manipulate it in your head. In real life that might translate to difficulty calculating how much to pay as a tip on a restaurant bill (although that could also be impacted by the level of indifference of your waiter) or adjusting your itinerary for the day on the run.

The women experiencing difficulties also had problems with maintaining focus on a challenging task. This could range from having difficulty doing your tax to completing a complex report for work to finishing a challenging book.

Although these kind of tasks are not usually associated with what we call “memory”, they do come back to deficits in working memory. The women could still remember things in the sense that they could tuck away a piece of information and retrieve it. The end result though of the deficit in working memory is the experience of a generalised “fog” when it comes to thinking.

Interestingly, these cognitive difficulties were not tied to hormone levels. The evidence is though that as many as 66 per cent of all women experience these difficulties during menopause. It indicates that for some women this “brain fog” during menopause is a real thing. It doesn’t meanthat you need to surrender to it, it does mean that by acknowledging and understanding what is happening you can make adjustments to deal with it.